skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just received this email re: this article from a friend who lives in Foster City (S.F. Bay Area):

>This article is completely true in everything it so sadly illustrates. Many are leaving and have been for while, and it’s not atypical for so many of us to consider where we might go. But there is also the reality that while the average guy leaves, for a “better” quality of life, the wealthy are still coming. The weather is still the weather here and if you can afford it, well... you do.

OK, I admit, the issue of climate change and its attendant disasters are tugging at the consciousness of everyone, but even the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes were eventually forgotten. The smoke is frightening, but for most people on the coast, it’s an inconvenience that passes as the season passes.

In my little burb of Foster City, we are breaking ground in a few weeks on a project to raise our levee, in anticipation of a potential hundred-year storm. It’s disconcerting, thinking about living in a bowl surrounded by bay. It’s also sad, as they are closing portions of my bike trail for the next three years and the noise and dust will make life less livable.

I’ve thought about leaving. The smoke is choking and having had two spontaneous pneumothoraxes, I’m particularly protective of my lungs.

I live in a paid-for house that needs work. The roof is old, the foundation possibly crumbling, the windows need replacing, and we can hear every sound through the walls. It was built of matchsticks in 1966, and is now worth much more than it’s cheap construction should warrant. I have thought about selling it and moving to Texas, where I could buy a sprawling ranch, or Sante Fe where I could have breathtaking vistas or Oregon, where I could buy a historic Victorian and decorate it until I die.

My parents have passed, my family history less pulling. I have a brother in Fresno where the temp regularly reaches 110 now, another nearby who actually hates the liberal politics here. He wants to leave too. My kids are college age, they would return to any nest I build, but the California coast still has the weather. The mansions I could buy elsewhere would trap me in their climate controlled paradise. Some days, as I’m flying along the water on my trike, breathing the normally fresh air and feeling the cool breeze on a sunny day, I think how lucky I am to be here.

Who knows, that may change. One really strong temblor, or fire seasons that stretch into winter, or that hundred-year flood might send me to San Antonio or Tucson or West Virginia or even Vermont. But I don’t really like change and while the idea of a fresh start might have been exhilarating even a decade ago, the reality of packing up the detritus of a long life is totally unappealing now. More likely, I will just continue to peruse those beautiful listings on Zillow and stay in what I’ve come to feel is the center of the universe, waiting for the smoke to clear.
> the cost of ending the experiment results in immediate gains.

This is oft-parroted without any hard evidence though. If it were true even broadly, most companies would be doing absolutely no R&D because all R&D is just cost in the near term.
Most code bases in most companies.
ARM was second place in laptops for quite a while (arguably still.)
As someone who might quit the software industry myself (after 30+ years) very soon, I can give you a lot of reasons why that might be a reasonable decision ... but the interview process, as bad as it often is, isn't one of them. There are still places that haven't succumbed to the mania for interview processes that are supposedly meant to minimize false positives and/or eliminate bias but have really become more of a hazing ritual. You just need to keep trying until you find one. It took me a long time to find my first programming job, when I had neither degree nor (obviously) experience, but I kept at it and eventually got my foot in the door for what turned out to be a pretty good career.

It might also help to remind yourself that often the goal of these exercises is not actually to extract a technical answer but to observe how you think through a new problem, ask clarifying questions, handle disagreement, etc. Just stay calm, stay personable, ask questions, be willing to say "I don't know" if that's the case, and remember that another person's hasty judgment is a reflection on them rather than on you.
Given how many kids and youth are growing up with only cell phones and limited (or no) experience with real computers, these days Word and Powerpoint experience is a differentiating skill in certain circumstances. It's obviously not relevant for IT workers but it's absolutely something for employers to pay attention to if they're hiring young people for unskilled positions.
Ask HN: What is a good recent course, paid or free, to get started with Kivy?
I tried one of the best-sellers on Udemy, but it required a deprecated version of Cython that pip refused to install for me. Although I found a workaround for that, I quit the course because I'm afraid I will run into more dependency issues further into the course.
Of course they do, but a lot of people are behind CGNAT and do not have a public IP address assigned to their CPE, and as such reaching a device in the LAN from the outside - without the device reaching out to you first - is impossible.

And, of course, it can't reach out to your phone because it's also behind CGNAT. So, you need a VPS to act as a bridge between your phone and the device, which would connect to the VPS on boot and route traffic through a tunnel.
Ask HN: What Is a Moonshot Project?
What does "Moonshot Project" mean to you?

It's certainly an evocative name: A seemingly unreachable, but supremely inspiring goal.

Bringing a nation or other large group together, devoting, time, money, and attention in small discrete areas of focus, building up those areas of focus to the larger goal.

Are there any 'true' moonshot projects left? Is it a moonshot in relation to the size of the group?

Your thoughts please!
Guess he should have read the news and realized there was a pandemic going on
You may want to watch the feature on Ernie Johnson, NBA sportscaster. I think it was an ESPN E:60 episode, maybe HBO Real Sports. He has an adopted adult son with very severe mental and physical impairments. Mr Johnson may be the most inspirational person I've ever seen.
This sounds really bad. In searching the web for this title it seems like small news services are running this. To be fair to Facebook, I am willing to wait a day and see what they and other organizations/news/people say about this disclosure.
> I think we need something like Namecheap + CloudFlare + ngrok, designed and marketed for self-hosters and federators. You simply register a domain and run a client tool on each of your machines that talks to a central server which tunnels HTTPS connections securely to the clients.

PageKite (https://www.pagekite.net) is what it sounds like you're looking for. It'll set you up with a url, SSL, and a tunnel in about 30 seconds. Highly configurable for your own domain if you'd like, multiple ports etc.
Not at all surprising, raising a ton of money usually gets that investor onto your board who probably now wants you to cut unnecessary spending.
Outbound links also remove the reader from the newspaper's ad revenue stream.
> Maybe we should start force-feeding lsd into people who actively vote against and stand opposed to scientific progress.

Maybe we should stop assuming that every selfish impulse, gluttonous instinct, and absurd demand on the universe is somehow "scientific" and "good". Who wants to live longer if you can't appreciate the one, short, life you do have? Why waste it trying to get more? Life extension has at its core an unquestionable assumption that parades itself as morality--the sanctity and worth of human life!--but it is really the basest narcissism and selfishness that is utterly alien to the functioning of every single component of this vast ecosystem. Things die.

> Sinking into the past and eventually erased from living memory. I once saw a picture of a guy in the 1920s who bred horses in the Greek mountains.

Yeah, well, the atoms that make up the molecules in the proteins in the cells in your body were manufactured in the massive explosions of supernovae billions of years ago that no one remembers. You think your great grandfather is lost to the sands of time for all eternity, when in reality he is only lost to you. It's just a further expression of unquestioned selfishness, wanting more life for yourself by coopting his into your experience. Let your great grandfather and his entire life be as it was. There is nothing required more of him now.
Life extension would mean a massive change in population growth dynamics. That's pretty scary from a politician's perspective.
Don't the other ones have TEXT, too?
> Facebook is just a mirror

This is an echo of the "dumb pipes" argument, which characterizes social media as neutral carriers of both harmless and harmful content. While I recognize that harmful ideology originate outside of Facebook, it's really unhelpful to deny that in Facebook's capacity as "a fun-house mirror that magnifies some things and minimizes others" it's really very deliberately shaping the discourse, the zeitgeist and, as such, political reality.

We don't know the algorithm's ultimate purpose. It is, inevitably, biased. What biases Facebook management has decreed (and how closely its implementation hews) is an unknown to those of us on the outside. But it's certainly not, at this point an accident.

Whenever discussing algorithmic bias, I am always reminded of the old programming koan:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937
The mess they are in isn't just about faking one demo one time when they were 2 employees in a basement building a landing page. They consistently lied about basically everything, including key and core components.

"In October 2019, Nikola announced it would revolutionize the battery industry. This was to be done through a pending acquisition, but the deal fell through when Nikola realized (a) the technology was vaporware and (b) the President of the battery company had been indicted months earlier over allegations that he conned NASA by using his expense account to procure numerous prostitutes.

Nikola has never walked back claims relating to its battery technology. Instead, Trevor continued to publicly hype the technology even after becoming aware of the above issues. The revolutionary battery technology never existed – now, Nikola plans to use GM’s battery technology instead."

"Inexpensive hydrogen is fundamental to the success of Nikola’s business model. Trevor has claimed in a presentation to hundreds of people and in multiple interviews to have succeeded at cutting the cost of hydrogen by ~81% compared to peers and to already be producing hydrogen. Nikola has not produced hydrogen at this price or at any price as he later admitted when pressed by media." [1]

Tell me again how this is not like Theranos?

[1] https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/
The radio facilitated in the rwanda genocide, and is probably a bigger influence than facebook, as far as last-mile delivery of information is concerned.
In my day Polaks and Brazilians played Tibia.
Apple probably wasn't involved at all. Someone just saw they could make a career out of seizing "800K" of counterfeit American products without doing any diligence.
Sounds like a way to incentivise new employees to move to the highest COL locations ASAP, to take advantage of the salary bump for things such as 401k contributions, any matching 401k company contributions, and Social Security earnings calculations.
When America sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

(this person for example, is a criminal and owes the Canadian government half a million dollars for his crime. Soon the Canadians will be building a wall.)
Show HN: Lofimusic.app, an open source Background Music Progressive Web App
That was sort of my point. If the goal was to cut costs, it would make sense that the more costly employees, who are usually older, were let go first. To me that's not evidence of ageism even if it did impact older people more.
Here's much more readable version, produced by TRIM web service:

https://beta.trimread.com/articles/38118

(you can also go to the main page of this site and enter the URL there)
In my experience, you have to be way above 1 TB per day to get banned - I know because I pushed around 5000 simultaneous HD streams on my account back when I ran a pirate streaming service (Google my name if interested, it's on the Verge), and it lasted for a few days before I shut it down due to MPAA, but didn't get banned by CloudFlare. I still have the account that I did that on, it's from 2011. and still used for a few of my sites.
Original piece, with almost-full version of the memo: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
>It's worth noting that Pennington had already been cautioned (and fined) by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police earlier in the trip but had continued to flout the law.

He fucked around and found out, I guess!
Using Xirsys TURN servers happily (be careful some of their "getting started" examples are wrong). I tried to use Twilio, but failed, they did not recognize my mobile phone number. Even after begging 3 times to become their customer and paying for it, I could not succeed.
Liars will always be liars
It's worked for malware, hasn't it?
>lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps...

Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world.

I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy.

This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.
> "The need for very long focal length refracting telescope objectives was finally eliminated with the invention of the achromatic lens in the middle of the 18th century."

I understand only the most basic optics; would there be any use at all for a very long telescope in space?
You should add a blowjob obstacle where a mouth takes up the full width of the play area and works it’s way down except leaving a little space at the bottom and then goes back up, clearing out most of the competition.
How come you might quit the industry?
Word, that is all.

Hard news for any of us. Find others who you can draw energy from, talk to. It helps.
Looks like the NYT ran a short summary https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/technology/facebook-manip...
Interview with a Product Manager at Microsoft
I know entirely too many people who are fully darn aware there’s a pandemic going, complain about the pandemic, while still doing things they probably shouldn’t, if they wanted the pandemic to end.

Like driving cross country to visit people in four different states.

There are people out there who know. They just don’t care. Exactly like this guy.
Banks do not report checking account history to the credit bureaus. You can function fully with a checking account and debit card. You can get by using money orders and cash, millions of people in the US do.

If you borrow money, you agree to certain terms, one of which is reporting to the credit bureaus. Nobody is forced at gunpoint to borrow money. There is no coercion and no duress.

The system is not fair, I’ll concede to that.
He was fined $900 the previous day and ordered by the police to stay in his hotel until continuing his trip to Alaska. They found him the next day at a sightseeing gondola. He claimed he was just out looking for food, when there was food available at his hotel. He deserves whatever he got.
Exactly this. However, smart people are manipulated by the illusion of individual choice and their ability make above-average decisions. Less intelligent people are manipulated through slightly different mechanisms, but intelligent people are enlisted just as surely, and their confidence in their own unique individual attributes creates a trap. We are social animals. Libertarianism is simply the will to power, not a an expression of truth.

Every genocide is portrayed as a unique accident, but they follow the same gamelan. Facebook is literally a crowd control mechanism and it works no matter how smart you think you are.
> Hate Speech on Facebook

I despise the way Vice has to make such an important topic "Woke"

They are using dead Ethiopia's in a genocide for their own agenda. Could they not turn it off and be centrist for such an important topic.

I was interested how Rwanda was referred to, specifically cockroaches and radio at the time.

Some people did refer to it as hate speech - 1996 - https://www.article19.org/data/files/pdfs/publications/rwand...

Hate media was also popular when referring to the incident.
I'm in my late 50s so I recall news in the 70s. There were basically 3 networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and if there was a slant, they all had the same slant. There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news there was just news. Sure, there were fringe elements like the John Birch Society, but they were considered so far out of the mainstream that they weren't even on most people's radar. We also still had the Fairness Doctrine. Now the fringe conspiracy theorists have huge followings. There's a very deep epistemic gap between the various factions of society. The possibility that this will spin out of control - especially since we have a leader who seems to want to fan the flames of division - is terrifying.

Case in point: The Oregon fires are happening in the politically Redder part of the state, but many not too far from Portland. There are rumors going around in those Red areas that "left wingers" and BLM started the fires. Folks in those areas are generally very well armed. If those rumors get traction (and from looking through social media they seem to be) and people think that the folks on the left burned down their houses and towns... it's not gonna be pretty. We've already had trouble with right-wing groups showing up in Portland looking for a fight on several occasions and the police don't seem to be inclined to try to reign them in probably because these groups are so well armed.

At this point I'd just as soon see FB, Twitter, et al shut down before this gets ugly. But I also suspect they'll find other outlets on the internet for spreading conspiracy theories.
No amount of technology can fix a dysfunctional org.

A large amount of the work of BI is getting data into the right shape in order to ask questions about it.

- What’s level on average do new players drop off?

- How are sales of the new skins we introduced performing vs the last set?

- How often are players engaging with feature A vs B?

You might be able to answer all of these questions with just event data in a wide table, but you’ll write very different queries to answer them. dbt is a way to write queries on your source data that leads to systematic, repeatable, and reusable new tables for answering analytics questions.
Unsolicited constructive criticism is that I think the comic could do with a bit more spacing between the panels, it gets easier to read feels less dense that way - that's what I think.
Wow relax...All I said was I prefer working in an office setting; I didn't say you had to come back to the office. If you prefer working from home then you should work from home.

> Diversity folks, or if you will, different strokes for different folks.

I agree but it sure sounds like you don't based on what you said a few sentences earlier.
Discussion of the Buzzfeed piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24474343
Not sure they do that now but having a credit card without pre-payment meant very hard to try their services. For some it is important to have services. For 1 man shop it hard as too many things to worry about and trying is not really priority.

Their instance with real usage charge. Not much but accumulate and I gave up.

Still remember trying fast ai, left a credit card to another service provider and after an alert I owe them 1000 ... luckily that card is expired. And they do void as they check I have not used their service.

Another has prepaid paypal. Like that. For testing only of course.
Signing a contract isn’t consenting?
I’m not so sure that’s what globalism is about?

I mean, entertainment and media is a small part of the global economy dollar-wise even if it has lots of influence, local content laws as protectionism don’t harm a lot. the Japanese (Among others, say China or India) have done a pretty good job of adopting other cultures and various products without losing their uniqueness.

Travel I think is a short term (2-3 year) pause.
Anyway ISP that blocks port 80 or uses CGNAT is obviously not good a selection for such a user. So it's serious suggestion if you can choose ISP. There are many places where can choose ISP even not in SV (maybe outside US).
The alternative is introducing some regulation around patterns of usage.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24474343.
Those are not suicide plugs and what is there is code compliant.

Suicide plugs refers to extension cords which have been built (or modified) so they are male/male. One in which the far end will be exposed while energized. In this system, the male plugs will never be energized while exposed.
it came and went, postgres and sql server were (and still are) referred to as "object-relational" because of their support for rich user-defined complex types. it's just not that practical real-world because we tend to start with first normal form which complex types violate naturally.

> whether or not there's something about RDBMSs that I just don't understand

perhaps if you consider the entire result of some query to imply the type of the thing being modeled rather than any given table or cell, then it's more obvious that the basic types supported aren't much of a limitation? afterall you can always include a "type" indicator (or project one from a more sophisticated relational model).
You consented by doing the credit check to apply for the apartment. Did you sign anything? Did you read what you signed?

Every place I’ve ever rented has been without a credit check, so it’s possible to get around that.