skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Your lede and finish are somewhat contradictory, don't you think? English can't both lack nuance and expressiveness, and be difficult to translate because of the nuance and expressivity!

Depends on what "nuance" exactly means here. What I meant is specifically the kind of logical and structural ambiguity like what "NOT" refers to or what "TOO" refers to. For example "I ate lunch, too..." can be continued as "... not just my friend" or as "...not just breakfast". In Hungarian this wouldn't be possible because the grammar is less ambiguous. The word order would tell what the "too" refers to, similar with "not".

English feels distinctly "Tarzan-like", it feels like words put next to each other. Most of the difficulty in learning English comes from the strange orthography and the difficult phonology and, yes, some of the grammar too, like tenses. But students can start building correct sentences from day one, because there is not much complexity in the grammar. High fancy prose in English is mostly about using rare words and synonyms, not through intricate grammatical structure.

As I said one effect in the opposite direction is the richness of tenses in English. All the "I had been going" or "I used to go" and "I have gone" and "I am going" kind of complex tenses do not exist in Hungarian. So it may be that we just notice the parts of our native language that have no equivalent in the second language, while discounting things we don't "need" as extraneous complexity and fluff. For example in Hungarian if you want to tell a story with complex timelines, you can't rely on tenses alone as in English, you have to give more explicit times or say "before that" and "meanwhile" and similar temporal phrases explicitly.
There's no need to refer to "conspiracy theories" (although Bill Gates's close ties to Jeffrey Epstein after his 2007 trafficking conviction did not do him any favors there). The ulterior purposes of the Gates Foundation are pursued mostly in the open:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundat...

https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
I had no idea they were a 20 year old company.

I assumed they were a fresh startup around 2015 or so when they started getting a lot of media traction.

Maybe I was just out of the loop, but that's really surprising to me.
This is just factually incorrect. USPS does not provide to the door service for massive swaths of the country.

I know this because as I type this I’m sitting in a house in a rural area of upstate NY that doesn’t have USPS delivery. When clueless e-commerce merchants send me things via USPS anyways they never arrive and eventually get sent back.

This situation is not uncommon at all.
Would China actually bother with that? I don't think so. They like doing business with the Americans, and that would basically be a declaration of war to the USA. Even if it didn't boil down to that, sanctions would hurt them plenty, much more than they want. After all, Taiwan wasn't not for a split second part of Communist China, so what's the point of risking anything for an overcrowded island as long as no one recognizes them as independent?

So yes, I think the conflict will definitely remain frozen for the next decades, and it will be at least until either the CPC loses control of the mainland, the USA lose their grip on the region, or some US politician goes bananas and pushes for Taiwanese independence.
It is probably not going to crash before the election - although there could be temporary dips. Unless the October surprise turns out to be particularly dire.

After the election, it probably will. No matter the result.
Does anyone know how his "The Downtown Project" (aka Vegas revitalization) is going?
More details in the S-1:

> Our top three customers together accounted for 33% and 28% of our revenue for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2019, respectively, and 31% and 29% of our revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Given the incentives, isn't this a Robin Hood story ? Bill Gates, Robbing the rich to give to the poor ?

But the problem is that we are those rich people. We as tech people have suffered under the microsoft monopoly. Heck, we still suffer, from the horrors of windows 10, to browser incompatibilities, etc.

So we hate Microsoft. So it's hard to love Bill.
The problem with that is the purpose of a credit card system is convenience, especially the convenience involved in being able to represent the identifier in an easily compact manner. When it's a few groups of digits, I can print it onto a card or piece of paper, and just plug the digits in whenever I need to validate the number and run a transaction. You can't do that with a token. What happens when I want to use my friend's computer to pay for something on Amazon but I haven't saved my card number? Or when I get a new card? I get that the current credit card system is monolithic and outdated, but it's purpose isn't to be modern, it's to be reliable, convenient, and adaptable, and it does a swell job at those things. There's absolutely no need to spend astronomical amounts of money to replace this system with something more modern.
What English are you referring to? The variety [0] known as American English? Black American English? New Zealand English?

I don't speak Scots, but it looks like it has some notable differences, enough to be considered a dialect, but not enough to be considered a different language outright.

Also, the line between a "language" and a "dialect" isn't as clear cut as one might initially think, and it tends to involve politics. I recommend listening to this [2] episode of Lexicon Valley about it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(linguistics)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

[2]: https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2019/08/john-mcwho...
No personal experience here, either, but word on the street last year was that he was widely disliked outside of Zappos.

When I lived in Nevada, he was heralded as the future savior of downtown Las Vegas, having bought up a bunch of dead motels and vacant lots to transform into something new and better. Plenty of "tech disruptor" headlines in the newspapers.

After a few years, when virtually nothing came of it other than a quirky-but-empty strip mall and a clubhouse for his hangers-on to gather in, there started appearing articles about people being unhappy with how things were going, and him in particular.

Never heard about any strife from inside Zappos, though.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/hsieh-lands-in-court-...

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/nightclu...

https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtown-project-lays...
If it's not feature complete, how can it be an official release??
You should see what's happening in the biotech sector. This will be a record year with 40+ IPOs.
Bill Gates invests $78M in satellite antenna firm Kymeta
Easily solved by analyzing the color of the banana peel and recommending a quantity of peanut butter to match
IMO this ends up being way more advertorial (for Bauer) and lacks all of the engineering context (urethane inserts! damping! "the dichotomy between nature and human technologies"!). But, understood.
OT but: If this wave of (interesting to HN) IPO filings continue, someone ought to create something to make these documents a bit more readable.

Some snazzy CSS selectors + js magic + pdf.js something something perhaps? Because SEC doesn't provide nice PDF's, right? I haven't found anything at least.
Looks like a pyramid scheme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_game

I'd love to see the document on the Google drive, though! OP, can you share it somehow?
Isn't their entire business based on collecting, mining, and selling data to government intelligence agencies?
While that is also true, in this group all integers are equal to each other. The point is that there is nothing particularly interesting about the specific 2+2=5 example, not that groups in which this is true can't be interesting.
Oh, how high-minded and ethical of them, to turn down "opportunities to .. collect or mine data" like the rest of Silicon Valley does. Give me a break.

It's one thing for consumer internet companies to show me an ad for mattresses because they know I searched for mattresses. It's wholly another to help government entities aggregate license plate data, run "predictive policing" programs, run the Pentagon's spy drone program, and help ICE track immigrants, as Palantir does. Frankly if given the choice I'll take the mattress ads.
> undefined behavior shouldn't instantly invalidate results

Granted, it's not a guarantee that the results are wrong, but it's a serious issue with the experiment. I agree it wouldn't generally make sense to retract a publication unless it can be determined that the results are invalid. It should be possible to independently investigate this, if the source-code and input data are published, as they should be.

(It isn't universally true that reproduction of the experiment should be practical given that the source and data are published, as it may be difficult to reproduce supercomputer-powered experiments. iirc, training AlphaGo cost several million dollars of compute time, for instance.)

> this mindset is what keeps people from publishing the code in the first place

As I explained in [0], this attitude makes no sense at all. It has no place in modern science, and it's unfortunate the publication norms haven't caught up.

Scientific publication is meant to enable critical independent review of work, not to shield scientists from criticism from their peers, which is the exact opposite.

> Let the scientists publish UB code, and even the artifacts produced, the executables. Then, if such problems are found in the code by professionals, they can investigate it fully and find if it leads to a tangible flaw that invalidates the research or not.

I'm not sure what to make of 'professionals', but otherwise I agree, go ahead and publish the binaries too, as much as applicable. Could be a valuable addition. (In some cases it might not be possible/practical to publish machine-code binaries, such as when working with GPUs, or Java. These platforms tend to be JIT based, and hostile to dumping and restoring exact binaries.)

I agree with your final two paragraphs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24264376
Palantir lost half a billion dollars last year & are notorious for overpromising to clients but ultimately under-delivering.

I'd say they're still a Silicon Valley company at heart.
Again random urls are just a demonstration of the problem.

At root is private name resolution. What one bundle sees as asdf23f23g.js is different from what another bundle sees as asdf23f23g.js is different from what the web sees as asdf23f23g.js.

A site changing URLs often is a pain filter list authors deal with (automation, etc). Private namespaces for URLs is the real problem here that makes the proposal dangerous (and using it to randomize URLs is just a demonstration of how the dangerous capability can be used)
TECO-GAN Video Upscaling [video]
One of my favorite (and definitely my Mom’s favorite) parts of Zappos is the hand written note that they send with each pair of shoes.

My mom is an avid walker and she loves comfortable shoes so most birthdays and Christmas’s I send her a pair from Zappos.

The hand written note is such a nice touch for such a big business (especially from a parent company like Amazon- the anti-personalizer) that it makes the gift of Zappos (or even the gift card) something fun to give and fun to receive.

Tony, keep on experimenting! It makes it more fun for the customer.
> the post says that we won't be able to block ads and read the rest of the page anymore

Right, I'm claiming the post is wrong, and that this is not something WebBundling makes (newly) possible or makes easier.
+ Neat example of using the synthetic data to balance limited ML datasets: https://towardsdatascience.com/improving-massively-imbalance...
My employer was a customer of theirs for a few years. Horrible service, our support pushed down in favor of their government contracts, etc. Grapevine says that they do some pretty shady stuff for the gov as well.
Only slightly more insane than keeping the handy 4x4 format, but extending it from base 10 numbers to base 16, which I would really love to see :D
They are things I want to revisit and I found that putting in a "To Sort" bookmark folder doesn't cause me to revisit. I am forced to eventually revisit and decide if I still need it or not. But I don't go to 300 tabs, I usually purge around 100 or less.
I am leery of any company that comes off with culty-vibes and that was the impression I got from various media I read and watched about it. I’m sure it’s great for business but not for me, I am free thinker. Same reason I think Ray Dalio / Bridgewater is an insane asylum. I briefly worked with someone who did a stint there and he embraced the principles / radical transparency thing and it made him extremely hard (even obnoxious) to deal with.
I first learned about him from reading about drunken Zappos employees ordering a 100x100 burger from In-n-Out

http://whatupwilly.blogspot.com/2006/01/in-n-out-100x100.htm...
1 billion per country/brand/issuer tuple, that is.

It still seems like a comfortable amount of numbers.
It's never too late. Invent yourself then reinvent yourself.
Big question: "where does their monster dictionary comes from?" I find it very unlikely they get root passwords from simply scooping public leaks.
Don't you need to be registered in the developer program to sign your code for Apple's embedded platforms?
According to the newspapers, poorly. Very little to show for it.
My mom uses a gardening community app which has users from around the world. According to her, many users across several continents/countries have been experiencing this (North America, Europe, Australia, other parts of Asia). You receive a package in the mail which contains some small, low-value item (often seeds) that you definitely didn't order. Some of her friends on the app have apparently tried planting the seeds and have grown unexciting plants (eg tomatoes). But, for fear of unleashing an invasive species, don't do this.

The prevailing hypothesis is that it has to do with spoofing reviews on some ecommerce platforms.
The sellers can boost their apparent number of sales and give themselves fake reviews, but there is a customs verification step which requires them to verify for the platform that they actually sent out a package. So they create a fake package with something very cheap inside and mail it to a random address in the country of their choice.

There have been a number of articles concerning it as well: for example, this one from Chicago -- https://abc7chicago.com/china-seeds-from-plant-in-mail/63385...
You should read Delivering Happiness
How does spying on your own citizens “even the field”?
Sure, and I have about a dozen that I use for Firefox on the desktop as well. But this change is for Firefox Android.
Many of these complaints seem... odd. The primary complaint with Web Bundles is "they make the web like SWFs" - last I remember, people LIKED the fact that Flash content could be bundled that way. You actually were able to distribute Flash content like a normal web application, broken up into multiple SWFs, images, and so on. The vast majority of Flash content was a single file, because it's easier to distribute that way.

With WebBundles, if you want to deny specific subresources, you can still have the browser block them by identifier or hash, which is the same as you can do with a regular web request. The reason why there are no content blocking tools for PDFs is because nobody's bothered to write a PDF reader with that capability. Furthermore, I don't see how putting the resource identifier in the content of a bundle makes it easier than changing the URL. Both of those will either defeat or be defeated by caching.

If you have a CDN that generates random URLs for a single cached resource and serves them on the same domain as user websites, then identifier-based blocking won't work with or without WebBundles. You can do this today with Apache rewrite rules and PHP, which are about as economical as you can get. If your threat model is "people who just know how to SFTP a handful of JavaScript files" then yes, WebBundles makes things "easier". But I'd argue your threat model is laughably unworkable if that's the case. The state-of-the-art in adtech is to smuggle your fingerprinting platform as a randomized subdomain of the client site - how do you even begin to block that with identifiers alone?
I made a Mac app a few weeks ago that got to the front page here on HN[1]. It isn't notarized by Apple since I don't want to pay Apple just so I can give my work away for free that fixes something that shouldn't be an issue in their OS in the first place. When users run the app for the first time, they get a warning[2]. For that kind of popup to happen when anyone tries to use anything by Epic would almost certainly dissuade new users a bit. Currently you can run unsigned code on macOS if you disable some security options in preferences but soon that won't be possible[3]. It's already the case that unsigned code can't run on iOS, so for Epic to develop an engine on iOS they must be able to sign their IPA files so they can actually be installed on a testing iOS device which can only be done through Apple.

1. https://github.com/ther0n/UnnaturalScrollWheels/

2. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5874301/88485840-2...

3. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/icyif5/apple_silicon...
Https://www.kobo.com/es ?
I have great spatial memory for things I've read. I was able to pull up a quote from a book that I read the summer of 1992 seven years later because I remembered roughly where in the book and on the page the quote appeared. I could probably go to my library and find it still another 21 years later. I don't get that from e-books.
i think that’s what the “forward deployed engineers” do

but given Covid maybe they’re saving a bunch of money on employee travel
The nearest ref would pick it up and remove it once play left that area.
I don't have this issue but on mobile I switched to the nightly. Maybe that will help?
Making it per-user instead of per-deploy is simple today, though! Assign each user a first-party cookie, and use it to generate per-user URLs. Now users can cache across deploys as well:

1. First HTML request: Generate a random string, put it in a server-side cookie, use it to name the fingerprinting script.

2. Later HTML requests: Pull the random string out of the cookie, use it to name the fingerprinting script.

3. Requests for the fingerprinting script: see that the cookie is present on the request, return the script.

This is some work, but not that much. And unlike a WebBundle version, it is cacheable.
I complete agree with your case analysis, but disagree with the conclusion that the code needs to be runnable for it to be useful -- I thought this was the point of the discussion at hand? In most situations, having source code, even if it no longer runs, would be sufficient to conduct the analysis you describe.

I'm all for more transparency, and this includes making codes and data public as much as is reasonable. But the real test is if someone can independently replicate the result, and how to incentivize replication studies (in both computational and experimental science) is also important, and in my view should not be divorced from discussions of reproducibility.

Edit: rewrote to clarify my position.
Are you asserting that that’s a bad thing?
A wolf in sheep’s clothing: California’s AB 3262 “Consumer Protection” bill
I heard from some friends that work there that over the last two years, they have been offering very large discounts on 5+ year deals if they were paid for upfront. One can assume that this is to shift revenue into the pre-IPO financial years so they can show this level of growth in their S-1
Sigh. About time GPT-3 is put to use for content-blocking.
> Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems unlikely that a private company can serve these routes in a clearly fundamentally cheaper manner.

You're not wrong. None of the private mail carriers can beat USPS pricing on these routes and still turn a profit.
Impact of Go AI on the professional Go world
ungoogled-chromium works on Android too

https://git.droidware.info/wchen342/ungoogled-chromium-andro...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708688
> the Court doubts that an expert would suggest a zero percent alternative

It's unfortunate that the percentage cut ends up overshadowing the real antitrust issue, which is that Apple (and Google) essentially has the power to make or break any arbitrary business that relies on their platform. They base it on vague and loosely enforced rules, which means companies never know if tomorrow is the end. Having a locked platform in itself isn't an issue. Having an expensive locked platform isn't an issue either.

Having an oligopoly of locked platforms (that are important enough that companies can't ignore) with rules that can change or be selectively enforced and have the power to destroy your business model overnight, is a big problem.

Reducing the cut to 0% still wouldn't change that.
Because it doesn't just do good.
It's completely screwed up public education in the states for instance.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamebait to HN? We've asked you before, and you've done it twice in the last 24 hours. Not cool.

The GP comment wasn't great either but this was much worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wonder if PGO were at least part of the "toolchain optimizations" mentioned here: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/02/13/performance-o...
All claims seem to be based on the same URL mapping ability that's ascribed to WebBundles and for some reason, not servers or edge workers.

The infrastructure needed to randomize and remap URLs for bundles is basically the same as for endpoint URLs. You can already serve all requested content, including things a blocker might want to block, as first party, meaningless URLs. https://my-site.com/1g276dn4kas for everything. Store the URL map in the session data rather than bundle.

I don't even think the hard part in either case is mapping the URLs and serving the content, but rewriting all the references to the URLs in the source files.
Segment employee here.

Yes, we looked at Terraform to manage our topics. We are big Terraform user to manage our infrastructure. We mostly didn't go that way because we didn't want to have to manage the Terraform state. We also wanted the tool to be extensible and writing custom TF providers can sometime be tricky.
> A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.

That's certainly what the conservative news outlets are reporting, but is it actually true?
I can't even remember last i got an advertisement page. Must've been about 10 years ago, though the last 5 I've been using third party DNS. I don't know any Swedish ISP that does this. I'm using ISP DNS on my phone.
And my argument is that some harm is already happening to some consumers [0, 1] and some more harm is already happening to the many, many developers who have complained about Apple's reprehensible behavior surrounding their app store.

With a law that requires Apple to open their platform to allow actually usable sideloading and/or competing app stores, we'd have removed more harm than we've added.

[0] Me, for example since I can't even comfortably put a program, that I wrote, onto my own device without paying Apple $100 a year.

[1] Every one of my business customers who wants a native app for their customers who they already had a relationship with before Apple came along and stuck their nose in to say what we could and could not do with our customers customers devices.