skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Somehow Google greenlit this as a standalone product amongst many other options...

Even before the “internal incubator” that this came out of, Google hasn't been known for doing a single exclusive offering in a space, so this probably wasn't centrally green lot (because otherwise “internal incubator” makes little sense), and it's release wouldn't (even if it was) exclude another Google offering in the same space. The competitive process you imagine just doesn't seem likely to even approximate the truth.
Do you think the world would be a safer and more peaceful place if nobody stopped nazi germany?
Why books work: A rebuttal to Andy Matuschak (2019)
I started off thinking he had a good point, but when he came to textbooks, I realized that it doesn't match reality. If what he claims were true, then books like Selfish Gene; Guns, Germs, and Steel, etc. should leave me with LESS knowledge than a typical textbook, which at least has questions, tests, etc. associated with it. But, in fact, I'm pretty sure that most textbooks have taught me precisely nothing, or at least nothing that I retained a year later, whereas Pinker, Taleb, Dawkins, Diamond, and other such authors have absolutely taught me things that stayed with me. So, there must be something missing, and I think it's this: good books stay with you a while. I think about them a lot, for some time after reading them I keep revisiting the ideas.

If I never did that, perhaps I would learn as little from them as the author of this post. But, for textbooks, this almost never happens, and that is probably why textbooks do worse than other non-fiction, even though by his analysis here the reverse should be the case.
Having personal experience of some of these projects, some of their inclusion is definitely moderately unwarranted.

Take Sunbird. The source tree is organized as a set of backend modules, with various products including as many of them as they need and then throwing up the main frontend window on top (although SeaMonkey really has diverged its UI in quite a few places). Sunbird was the standalone calendar app, but it was decided that the calendar maintenance team was too small to maintain a standalone calendar and instead shifted their UI focus to only supporting SeaMonkey/Thunderbird integration (aka the Lightning extension). No code that actually did anything was removed--I was the one to actually hg rm it here: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/f2e605ee5475

As you mention, MXR was phased out in favor of DXR, which is itself being phased out in favor of searchfox. (I too worked on DXR, back in 2011). Prior to MXR, there was LXR (as in, lxr.mozilla.org), but I'm not sure it's worth mentioning as a separate project since it's basically an unmaintained fork of the LXR project.

While we're on the topic, there's a lot of "missing" webspaces here. Bonsai was a webtool to display atomic CVS commits, Tinderbox was the UI for seeing if the tree was broken (on fire) or not (this later gets supplanted by TBPL (tinderbox/pushlog), itself rewritten to not be a pile of hacks as treeherder), and there's definitely a buildbot clone/fork/I don't know floating about somewhere in the mix.

There's various versions of things like the addons website or support websites that I can't even enumerate off the top of my head as well. Some of these (like old addons stuff) was completely in-house, while others (like pastebin and etherpad) are hosted versions, potentially with some modifications, of other projects. None of these are listed, but do they even deserve to be listed? It's not consumer-facing, and I'm sure even many Mozilla developers would struggle to realize some of this stuff existed.
Interesting. This is the first time I've heard of Area 120. Looks like they have their own site.

https://area120.google.com
Currently, the push to become a multi-planetary species is just as much about marketing and it is about the technology. We need people excited for space so they go into fields where they can advance our ability to do stuff in space.

Finally putting a woman on the moon will give a face to young girls to look up to. That will bring a whole new set of smart people into the field. It’s not like we’re giving up on Mars because of it.
Consider the tourism all those empty offices could bring.
As an example, we still haven't solved the wrapping problem that's been known for 40 years and has a fairly simple solution.
Now it's turned from a comic truth to a tragic truth?
There’s been a couple of casual stuff Here and there on how no one will chargeback Amazon (or Walmart depending on demographic). Not worth the risk compared to dependency. I agree myself and ate a $125 loss from Amazon recently when it didn’t feel worth the trouble. But I’m almost any other circumstance, I would’ve charged back. I used an AMEX for the purchase too.

Similarly, until I weaned myself off using Amazon for majority of shopping, I had minor anxiety over other Amazon stuff. Like my return rate and I had 2 incidents of being sent junk instead of the couple hundred dollar electronic. I’m sure they log how often it happens to a customer and it’s possible to not be stealing but still get booted if it happens too much.
This vlogger had extensive travel in Tibet. Just one person's glimpse of what Han-Tibetan interaction looks like:
https://m.youtube.com/c/环华十年/videos?disable_polymer=true&itc...
The most recent episodes about Tibet were about a year ago so one has to really scroll down to get to it.
Yeah, Prague politicians are also hailing victories and thanking the coronavirus. Meanwhile, housing prices are up 30%, but who cares about reality, it is Airbnb doing it and it's dead, yay!
The best way to learn is one-on-one (given that the teacher/mentor knows what he is doing). We all have different processes and need different data to helps us get the big picture or tackle some problems more efficiently (eg: learning an instrument).

Unfortunately this approach is way too expensive and doesn't scale which is why we have all sorts of tech to distribute knowledge (books, classes, lectures, blogs, videos, etc).

I imagine 100 years from now we will have AI teachers that can reproduce the one-on-one experience.
I look forward to Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
Having to use third party HN readers at night works but I look forward to the day I don't have to.

I mainly use http://hn.premii.com/
I used those with SQL Server back in the day. Sandisk bought them
I’m working on a pet theory that the pandemic will cause a brief period of reverse urbanization. These happen sometimes, such as UK during WW2. Long term cities are still a good bet as urbanization has been happening as long as we have recorded history.
Tbh the power structures in Tibet [0] weren't that great.

[0]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%931951)#/Socie...
Microsoft expands Azure Arc’s hybrid cloud capabilities
I don't fall strongly on either side of these debates, but I'm kind of against the debate as a whole.

I just don't think that trade offs between short stay rentals, even airbnb hotels, and rental housing has much of a win in it for renters even if advocates get everything they want. It seems like a marginal, symbolic issue that sucks up a lot of attention without the potential for meaningful results.

Are bans on short term rentals going to noticeably affect housing prices of availability. If not, why are affordable housing activists so interested in this?

The whole thing feels like win hunting.
How India's ancient caste system is ruining lives in Silicon Valley
I always feel like the gloomy conclusion that we humans have no free will is always just two logical jumps away and we just prefer not to take them.
I think that post comes from the same place as comments demanding that longer form articles come with a paragraph abstract and that books should be summarized in a few pages. Because their valuable time is consumed with writing new ad-tech code or whatever. It's an efficiency above all else mindset.
Prison work release programs in the US have no fucking resemblance to forced labor in chinese concentration camps.

US prison work release programs are strictly voluntary, are paid (a pathetic pittance, but still paid), and prisoners can use the work experience to support applications for early parole. In many cases the work experience is valuable for gaining employment after parole.

The natural result is that these programs are popular with inmates, in spite of insultingly low pay.

Since you didn't bother to support your strawman (or should we call it a scarecrow?) with any citations:

https://fair.org/home/us-media-cant-think-how-to-fight-fires...
I have a Matrix client open, I've joined the rooms. As far as I can see, it's just Anders, me, and someone else popped in then left.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but perhaps it would be better to build up a core privately before trying to attract public attention? That or federation is broken and I'm missing pretty much all the room content..?
I've played the first reboot in the ironman mode, and there's a point to avoiding save-scumming, but there's a point where I find it may actually make the game less enjoyable.

I found myself making every move so calculated (and seeing it as a massive mistake whenever I failed at that) that it actually took away some of the atmosphere of the game for me. I had too much of a motivation to make the game less exciting and to make it as little about chance as possible, and in a sense it began to feel like work rather than an atmospheric story.

It might be a bit different in the original since IMO it seems much more difficult to calculate your moves and their potential outcomes as accurately. But that also makes it even more brutal in the original. (Or maybe I'm just worse at playing it, but that's how it seems to me.)
Show HN: Album Recommendation Random Sampler
Ah well remote work where everyone is co-located is very different to remote work where the people are 8 timezones away. Synchronous communication will always be hard between teams so far apart.
Afghanistan, Iraq? And that's before we get into proxy wars.
Don't do C++ now, but when I used to QtCreator was such a joy to work with.

The fact that it played so nicely with CMake was an added bonus.
I built Shfl because normal music recommendation systems drive me crazy. I think there's something wrong with the basic assumption that what I should want is to be suggested music that sounds similar to (but is probably not as good as) music I've already expressed interest in. What I really want is to be surprised by something I wouldn't ordinarily have thought of, and I want to enjoy the process of finding something to listen to. I want reasons for why I should try something beyond the fact that an algorithm selected it just for me, and I want some context.

So Shfl is what I came up with and have been obsessively tinkering with over the last year and a half or so. I posted about it a few months ago but I'm pretty sure it is done now, or at least I'm done tinkering. I think. It takes me a couple of hours on Monday morning to update, it costs about $100 a month to run, it's fast, and it works well. I've been introduced to tons of music that I really like that I would otherwise never have heard of.
As much as 3D TV did?
It has to start somewhere...
GP didn't specify, but I assume they meant the global West in general and not just the West-Coast.
The how part doesn't seem that difficult to me. It's like military conscription.

They offer you 'stable pay' and a 'chance to learn some useful skills' and a 'pension' if you accept and fines or jailtime for your whole family if you refuse.

Basically, it's work in a factory as an "employee" or work in a factory as an inmate.

People really have no other option than to accept.
I guess you weren't allowed to use a public cloud provider. Because you can always mount a network file system using sshfs, s3 like, or similar. Or upload the file on another server rented for one hour.
Use WSL2.

It essentially brings all the Unix stuff from Linux but gives you a Windows desktop with all the same mainstream applications, games, developer tools, etc.

It is the best 'Linux distribution' you can get with a sane Desktop.
Imagine the retrofit housing possibilities of the Apple UFO. It could be a self contained city.
This is what I feel now. A google product launch is just another opportunity for them to hurt me. I have friends who still pour one out for Inbox.
I came across this after reading the article and discussion here [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24542224
>will eventually run out of cheap rural labor

Premier Li KeQiang revealed this year over 600m Chinese still live on 1000RMB a month. China will _never_ run out of cheap labour. The reality is, even at the height of Chinese export economy 10 years ago, manufacturing "only" employed ~400M workers. China has more cheap work force than _global_ demand.

These poverty alleviation / sinicization programs are just that. They're trying to reign in minorities in frontier regions with separatism risk. The vocational training salaries compensates better than the aforementioned 600m on 1000RMB per month. The mass of Han rural poor looking for migrant work opportunities would riot if they found out how much minorities are "privileged" in these programs. Many are already pissed at the affirmative action privileges afforded to minorities in many facets of life.
What we can learn from the resurgence of 'shell money' in Papua New Guinea
> Prosecutor cites him saying, "no luck with that" as evidence he did try instead of evidence he didn't.

Surely it's evidence of intent (to be an accomplice to hacking) though.

If you ask someone to provide you with what they think is the combination to a safe that you don't have permission to access, then saying "no luck with that" (after receiving it) could still be valid evidence that you were intending at some point to steal something.
>This is an utter farce of a trial.

I agree. Especially since this is an extradition hearing and not a trial.

While you may not make any distinction between various types of legal proceedings, such distinctions do exist and the differences in statutes and legal precedents have significant impact on how such proceedings happen.

That said, I'm not under the illusion that the Trump administration (and the Obama administration) isn't trying to make an example of Assange.

But let's stick to facts rather than hyperbole. Just a crazy thought.
Looks like 2015: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/google-sheet...
Apple Services Outage
Very curious on how this versatile project will turn out. Google, with all of its collaboration tools like Sheets and Docs, really sucks at "Teams" (task and project management, for instance).

Probably because it's hard to fit all the use cases G Suite customers may have (tiny teams, giant enterprise, growing startups, etc).

Yet, I've always wanted that with my small team working off G Suite mostly. Always having to use an external Project management is fine, but having it done from Google itself would be a great touch. A little like Microsoft Teams/Sharepoint.

I hope that Table can bring us a little step closer.
"The examples he gives are all pop-science"

I don't think that's true of The Selfish Gene (and even more so for its successor, The Extended Phenotype, as one can tell just from the title). It seems to me to be a serious work on evolutionary biology.
> If this isn’t part of GSuite, then where does it belong in the Google organisation?

I suspect if it were to ever emerge from the “internal incubator” Area 120 is described as, it would become a GSuite feature.

> Or does Google not know that how they’re perceived?

I think Google knows that people in certain circles talking nothing but that view. They probably also have real stats on how their experiments are picked up and used, and I suspect they aren't at all what the people who think that the perception you refer to do instead public consciousness would predict.
Compose: Write Email with AI
Show HN: WhatFeatures – I didn't know what to build next, so I made this
I see this a lot. People fight against the aesthetic of things they dislike rather than the cause of things they dislike
Americans don't feel they can get justice when wronged by their ISP – survey
I too am underwhelmed by the article, but I don't think it's fair to call the books he describes "mediocre pop science books". By way of reminder, they're Dawkins's The selfish gene, Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow, and Diamond's Guns, germs and steel.

These are definitely pop science books. Like any pop science books, they can reasonably be accused of simplifying their material, favouring a particular interpretation of science that can be looked at in different ways, etc. The underlying science is (like all science) fallible too. But all this is just to say that they're pop science books. That doesn't make them mediocre pop science books, and it seems to me hard to deny that they are all unusually good pop science books.

It's not relevant for this purpose whether all the science turns out to be correct, nor whether Dawkins & Kahneman & Diamond let their own opinions obtrude too much; Matuschak's complaint isn't "I learned all this stuff and some of it turned out to be wrong", it's "I read these books and it turned out I'd learned less than I thought".

It is relevant whether the books present a nontrivial amount of content, whether they're explained clearly and engagingly, whether the ideas in them are (or were when the books were written) at least somewhat unfamiliar to nonspecialist readers. On all those counts, all three of these books do well.

So I don't think he'd have got better results by reading other less-mediocre popular science books. I also don't think the results would have been any better if he'd done the same thing with books on (say) philosophy, or history, or language. The problem is with some combination of (1) what he did and (2) what he hoped to gain from it, not with the particular books he chose.

I do agree that there is a big problem with (1) and (2). If you actually want to learn something then you need to do more than read one book on it; and reading a good book (even if it's what you call a mediocre popular science book) once will do you some good but what it does for you won't be to enable you to expound in detail on its contents at parties.
" the laws and federal government of the US"

Under their laws. They are equal to everyone else.
The attitude in this post is “I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I don't really remember what I read”.
Saw Stop is the original one. Bosch does have their own version called Reaxx, though it drops down through the table. They don't sell it in the United States due to patent issues with the Saw Stop version.
It's mainly to protect Hotels, bed-taxes, etc.
Microsoft fuels low-code app development with Power Platform updates
To the moon and beyond: How HoloLens 2 is helping build NASA’s Orion spacecraft
Seems like anything related to purchasing content is down.
Exactly what regulations are preventing new broadband providers from entering the market?
I'd bet their screening process is initially going to be very poor. Meaning that some of the gig workers may be the evictees themselves.

Silver lining: you can get paid to move to another place if you game this correctly.
It’s not just housing prices. It’s community and neighborhood. People want to live in a neighborhood with actual people, not a decentralized hotel. I say this as someone who has done short term rentals in Paris—it was nice for me, but I can see how annoying it must be for residents.
Or get your issue visible on social media
Han Supremacy. I can't take these clowns seriously.
Paris government hails victory that will give them more bribe money from local hotel owners.
Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinforce words, or later how they are used in sentences, then vocabulary, and so on until a point when the child has developed the skill to read unassisted. One could argue that the entire fiction genre is merely a roundabout way of reinforcing vocabulary (if one is inclined to do a cynical utilitarian take on the knowledge value they provide).

Extending from that, it seems a bit presumptuous to assume that a single book might then be able to convey all there is to any topic due to its size (compared to, say, listicles), given that reading itself is one of the most basic skills and one that - as we've seen - cannot generally be taught with a single book.

What books can do is expose you to some idea, in some form, so that you can soak up something from it and adopt it into your own mental framework. Pop culture / self-help books will often try to "sell" a central idea by showering you with stories and anecdotes (e.g. the 1-2-3 system in parenting books), but if you have the presence of mind to already understand that the examples are merely an attempt to add weight to an argument, then you can quickly summarize the meat (the "1-2-3", in this case) and think for yourself whether/when to apply that technique, vs other techniques that you might learn elsewhere.

There's a slippery slope in terms of how many core ideas one may pack in a book, vs how many supporting arguments one may add around the core idea. Add too many core ideas and you get something like a dry university textbook. Add too little, and you get books like Malcolm Gladwell. Mind you, having a lot of "frills" doesn't necessarily make a book bad. For example, many consider Godel, Escher, Bach to be a great read, even though [spoiler] it can be promptly summarized as an exploration on occurrences of recursiveness (through very colorful allegory). The beauty of GEB is that the supporting stories themselves give you a glimpse of new domains to explore.

At the end of the day, just like a library is a collection of disparate nuggets of human knowledge and no one's expected to uniformly learn all of it, books are but pieces of an ecosystem, with various degrees of "completeness" (as far as their core subjects go) and various degrees of flair; what one chooses to read or skim, and what they take away individually from each book is what the relationship between humans and books are all about.
Predicting Epidemics Like the Weather
And I hope it stays the way it is. I always found Firefox font rendering to be much more readable and easy on the eyes than Chrome's, to a point that most Electron software felt terribly blurry to me until they slightly improved it.
My favourite PDF fact is that it doesn't have to start at the beginning or end at the end of a file. Any sea of bytes that contains a PDF file is an acceptable PDF file...
There's a good reason why experienced devs say “it depends” so often
They should release the financials of the app and let companies bid to acquire the app and its userbase. Smaller companies get a shot at growing the business, users stay happy(er than they would otherwise) and google gets a shot at acquiring the original idea back should it succeed under the hands of people who give a damn.

Unfortunately, such a program would likely be sunset after a year.
It seems like some authors get over-ambitious about actually teaching the material. But as a reader, often I don't care enough to do the exercises, because I'm just exploring, and I don't know if I'll come back this way again. I haven't made a commitment to actually learn the subject yet. I just want to know the layout of the landscape and I'll come back to it if I actually need to know it.

In particular, I think hardly anyone really needs to know quantum mechanics well enough to do homework?

It seems like before testing effectiveness, you need to determine what subset of your audience shares the goals you assume. Often, it's only going to be a small fraction.
Microsoft teams up with NASA to help build the Orion spacecraft with HoloLens 2