skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sort of off topic:

I had fun writing feature flag system for java/spring for work. We rolled a lot of our own stuff for tighter integration and this was not exception. You could define an interface, slap on a special annotation and spring would provide an instance backed by a proxy. And this was for a web app, and so we made the toggles would configurable in the main app by admins. The UI for targeted roll outs was pretty simple but powerful. I never got around to adding mandatory cleanup dates, but it wouldn't be very hard. Adding automatic a/b tests would certainly have been a lot harder.

We did find them very nice for fresh implementations of common workflow screens. It was a big app and invariably some functionality would be missed and so we could just turn of the migrated section until we fixed it. Definitely had to do more QA work, but it shortened the turn around time and reduced the stress quite a bit because patches weren't as urgent.
USA vs Japan happened back in 2017.
Providing space for rent, especially to restaurants, is a gamble already in normal times. So one could argue that missing payments is part of the natural risk property owners have to bear.

On the other hand one could argue, that a government has to pay damages for business lost if they implement regulation shutting down that business.

At least, that is something that is part of modern international trade agreements. I know I shortened the argument here.

What I am trying to get to is the fact that there are no easy answers and that potential solutions will necessarily be colored by political leaning. This is a situation that is new and not solved with an easy fix.

Sadly.
Are you for real? If this article was about some roboticists in west virginia inventing this, would you say "They still smoke Oxycontin and die of fentanyl left and right, they need to fix their problems first". San Francisco has more than its fair share of human feces that isn't where it belongs and I doubt you'd make the same comment if this was invented there. India has plenty of issues, but that doesn't mean that people there can't freely pursue things like robotics because there are problems.
what its it, 3 Stories tall?
I feel like this might ignore that a good portion of restaurant sales are from the bar. Chilis, Applebees, to an extent BJs Restaurant. I feel only a few companies have adopted to the fact that you can deliver alcohol. There's no reason that those bar sales, can't be from the restaurant over postmates or uber eats.
The Fight over the Fight over California’s Privacy Future
You can just tether a power line to a drone so weight and batteries don't matter. And don't use a death saw.

This is why you'd do a drone. It's a good learning experience directly to industry.

A tree climbing robot is way more abstract. Which might be good depending on the degree. But you'll never work on tree climbing robots in real life.

Neither will ever be used by farmers to pick coconuts, so it depends on what you want.
Germany put a moratorium on evictions, allows deferral of some taxes, pays small and medium businesses up to three months of lost revenue (up to 150k€) and the state owned development bank gives out low interest loans to affected businesses.
We should just use the same objective approach as we use for classifying other drivers: anyone going faster than me is a dangerous asshole and anyone going slower than me is a dangerous idiot.

But with salary instead of speed, I guess.
The US is not "The West". Price/market segmentation, which is what you're describing (by region) is not exclusive to India or "The East".

"Finding out how high you can price" things is more of a strategy for veblen goods, it is certainly not how everything is priced nor exclusive to any geographic region... I don't think I'm following this at all. :)
Not surprising. Restaurants were marginal businesses during the best of times; reducing capacity by 25-50% is a death sentence for all but the most profitable ones.
On the telephone game of history, I enjoyed a line in 1984 (ch.7):

> "There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories."

It's not true (as we well know, being our own primary sources[1], but upon reflection, even without the explicit right, it's not exactly difficult to find some capitalists[2] who behaved as if they had had the implicit right, so neither is it strictly false.

[1] and having heard the slander instead applied to feudalism

[2] Pedantically, the ones who have been in the news are the capitalists' agents, the high class house servants we call CEO instead of majordomo. Actual capitalists sleeping with factory women (pace Zweig's account of the pre-1914 World of Yesterday) is generally found more in genre literature than in journalistic pages.
I always see the argument of "when all the mom & pop landlords are gone, major corporations will own everything, so we have to protect them".

That consolidation is going to happen anyways. It's inevitable. The only factor is how long it takes for it to happen, and how big the payout will be for small landlords when they finally decide to cash out. There's much more at stake for the renters.

Forcing small landlords into choosing between selling immediately or facing bankruptcy in the near future is morally preferable to putting the burden on renters. The world isn't really a worse place if a landlord has to liquidate their assets at a 150% net profit now instead of 320% in ten years (after accounting for all rent collected and taxes paid).

If they had the capital to afford a commercial property in the first place, this won't be potentially life-ruining. You can't assume the same for a non-chain restaurant or grocer that serves as the owner's livelihood.
Banks and/or the Fed. Which also happens to be the easiest place to implement fiscal relief via debt or just plain creating money.
Why and how I emigrated to Canada
Why should a company hire two lines of support to shield an engineer from bugs they introduce?
thanks that was interesting.

tl;dr: 2 years free rent with the condition that the tenant doesn't ask for a lower price. due to language in the contract the rent can not go beyond a specific (low) value. the loan isn't held by the bank but immediately restructured and sold as a CMBS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_mortgage-backed_sec...)

here is the reddit post that he recaps: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird...
At very first glance at the article name I thought this might be about the old Windows CD burning application coming back to life...
Ask HN: How do I learn to write better code?
Some context for this question: I'm a mechanical engineer by training and I now work in robotics; developing path planning models in a research setting. I didn't have a traditional education in Computer Science. When I look at the computer engineering posts and comments on HN/Reddit, I feel woefully inadequate. I've never used these technologies like Kubernetes, Docker etc and feel out of place.

So, how do I write better code? How do I plug my CS foundation to better suit the current scenario of engineering?
So, not Germany.
Ox, horses, nowadays service dogs, animals have been used for a long time as workers in the West. I find the double standard incredible here, especially since it’s impacting very negatively the economy of a developing country. Making a label and the related checks about monkey abuse would be enough to solve the problem without banning their use.
In my experience the “off” path is only well tested the day the feature is released. Once the feature is out in the world the old tests go stale, and manual testing in effect never happens. It gets worse when a new ungated feature is built on top of something that was behind a flag (but always set to on). Suddenly code that was expected to always run doesn’t, and all kind of expectations get broken.

I’m most concerned about “What happens when your flag manager fails to return data.” This should be a rare event. In my previous organization (~500 devs) it happened twice, and was catastrophic for the ~4 hours to get everything fixed. If instead some unpolished features had leaked for four hours, no one would have cared.

If your organization has excellent hygiene at cleaning up flags, then off may be the sensible default, since you won’t have 10 years of cruft blowing up at once. But building a culture with that kind of discipline is hard, and automating it is non-trivial/often difficult to get developer resources for. Defaulting to “on” can be a pragmatic choice when you can’t invest in paying off all the tech debt.
Matrix does require some de facto centralisation for the identity server. But Mastodon really doesn't. I can set up a server right now and start federating immediately without involving any central system.
It seems like you're answering on behalf of a large group of people with differing views that your comment doesn't at all reflect. I, for one, oppose this monkey labor and I would argue I don't have more empathy for "animals than for humans." I try to be equal in many respects and would oppose humans being coerced into doing this as well. It's why I oppose slavery, for instance.
Mortgage and rent deferral is a sad joke.

Most of these businesses could barely keep up during the best of times; the vast majority of them will never be able to repay a single months missed rent, let alone half a years worth.

Mortgage and eviction deferral have only put off the inevitable; without forgivance or direct cash infusions, they’ll still fail, probably right after the last whisps of political will to fix this disappears.
Oh noooo. I see now. The documentation helpfully completely sidesteps this probably quite widespread scenario!

Thinking about it, it's not really on point for Google™©® to connect you with your customers; your outreach could be considered unsolicited and G could be argued to be enabling spam. What a wonderful situation G has dug for itself here.

The only thought I can come up with is to partially break or otherwise "wait what"-ify your extension's behavior to concretely capture users' attention. You mentioned it does PDF processing of some kind; a relevant example in this case could be injecting new page(s) into generated output (or watermarking, but that may be mechanically trickier, and my knee-jerk connection to watermarking could wind up being "meep, this software has just gone rogue on me" - and depending on my stress level I may not actually read any notices).

Said injected (or overlaid) content would likely immediately first clarify that visiting the options page and clicking a giant green button will 100% revert functionality. It would probably also do well to include a website name (also showing a giant banner), a contact email address (RIP in advance), and possibly a suggestion/invitation to forward the PDF to internal IT for review in case of doubt (which would neatly offload some % of "???" to external labor that is incidentally highly trusted, but may look odd).

FWIW, I noticed the latest versions of Chrome have redesigned the extension UI; overflow icons have moved from the system menu into a dedicated popup. Some users (Windows) likely have this update, while others (eg, myself using Chromium 83.0/Debian, and version-locked enterprise users) don't. So hypothetical screenshots would need to illustrate both flows.

Besides all that, auto-renewing to some (non-low-end, because why not) percentage of the current list price, and straightforwardly handling refunds, seems to be the only obvious fallthrough I can see.
Perhaps. I actually think some variant of sortition is superior to most voting systems to eg fill up a parliament; but to take the US as an example to argue that voting is bad would make the job too easy.

Eg the German electoral system is also a bit messy, but seems to work well in practice. That might be a better yardstick to measure what voting can do, before we dismiss it.

(My favourite sortition variant right now:

- everyone can register as a candidate, if they want to
- every voter can pick one candidate to put on their ballot
- we select a few hundred ballots at random to fill up a parliament

For completeness sake, add some mechanism to handle a single candidate being selected by more than one randomly drawn ballot. Eg you could draw again, or you could give that candidate extra weight in parliamentary votes, or you could form a chain and add a person of the double-candidates choice to parliament, or you could have voters write down multiple candidates in order, and just pick a later one on the voters list etc.

Parliament can then select the executive, like it is already done in the UK or in Germany.)
Landlords were/are bailed out in US. Landlords are businesses. MY LLC got a 30 year very low fixed interest loan, first 10K of loan automatically forgiven, based solely on the LLC's income from last year. The loan amount was roughly 60% of last year's revenue. Oddly enough, actual lost revenue was about equal to the loan amount, but the gov't had no way of knowing that and didn't even ask.
I'm sure every landlord in the country signed up for that or one of the several other coronavirus relief options. Any wonder why the stock market is up? That's a lot of free money sloshing around.
If you liked the original xcom you might also enjoy xenonauts which is a more faithful recreation than xcom enemy unknown.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/223830/Xenonauts/
And what I'm replying to you, is that my company is not the least bit interested in growing our Matrix instance any faster than the company itself.

Whereas if I ran a Mastodon instance, then of course, I would want as many users as my droplet could carry.
Was this just causing issues with wifi or did it affect the actual DSL signals?
If you want to PR and then maintain 200 html list item components by hand, you’re more than welcome to join as a co-maintainer. :)
> Bell’s complaint alleges he took the photograph in March 2000. However, the defense noted the skyline photo shows green grass and a working fountain. The defense argued that grass in Indianapolis is rarely green in March, and that records show the city did not turn the fountain on until April 2000. The company also pointed to Bell’s testimony that on the day he allegedly took the photograph, he took another skyline photo from the same location later that night. In the nighttime photograph, trees visible under streetlights have no leaves, whereas the same trees in the daytime photograph appear thick with foliage.

> In its verdict, the jury determined that Bell had not proved that he “authored the Indianapolis Skyline Photo, that he owns a copyright in it, and that he registered it with the Copyright Office.”

So from a previous trial, the guy couldn’t even prove the most basic claim that he’s the copyright holder.
Online betting on website metrics. Would you use it?
There are online sport bet shops. However if you could bet on various website metrics. Would you?
That might explain it--this is just a baseline level of spread and herd immunity knocks it down. It also begs the question of how to loosen restrictions because if NYC actually hit herd immunity for the current level of social interaction, not relaxing restrictions is unethical. You can't keep everything closed forever, and if there's a sign you've hit herd immunity, 3+ months of this is it. It might also be what spread looks like post-vaccine. How to know you're at that point where you can reopen is tricky.
> When you make that port 2222 or whatever, like so many people do, you have cut out a lot of noise... but now that compromised PHP application you had running has allowed someone to now race you every time SSH is restarted for an update or crashed or whatever to bind on that port.

This attack is mitigated quite strongly if you have selinux enforcing and aren't running networked services in unconfined domains.

Even if you have networked services that aren't confined in the default targeted policy, you can probably learn to write policy for them in a day or two, although poor documentation can make for a steep learning curve.
> In Nashville they closed bars and restaurants for 6 months because .004% of the cases came from bars and restaurants.

You're taking the number of cases that they've managed to contact trace to bars (difficult, especially if lots of cases all at once). You're then dividing that by the total number of cases, including the ones after they closed bars and concluding that it was the incorrect choice.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments. Could you please stop creating accounts to do that with? If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One of my favourite games growing up.

I tried replaying it about 10 years ago but it’s got serious quality of life problems with the mission aspect of the game.

Particularly, it had no way to remember or save gear assignments between missions. So you would spend like 5 minutes at the start of every mission giving your guys the correct stuff for their stats. Every. Damn. Time.

The other thing that bugged me on missions was no keyboard shortcuts, particularly for moving the view up and down levels. You had to use the mouse to click a UI icon which was quite tedious.

Still fond memories, but a pity those aspects made it too tedious to replay for me.

The newer XCOM game fixed those aspects and allowed you to jump right into the action.
For some definition of "hard time:" Sweden. On the other hand Spain and France are pulling an America right now. They're currently worse than the US for new cases per capita.
And provide a safety net for those people who choose not to risk their health to work in bars and gyms, right?
With the exception of the lateest one, I've loved all the x-com games dearly.

So many hours spent recruiting newbies, training them up, building equipment, researching tech then hunting down and killing alien scum!
I didn't say you -- I said many people.
The novelty of every single business having an app has worn off and less are being built and downloaded. The usage of native apps on mobile however is huge and outpaces the web by a large margin.
Yes if the intention was Washington state, I daresay it would have been described as an "offense".
I know it's the onion, I'm responding to the commentary that it's making. Many of its articles have depth to them.
The west has prices for lower income groups as well via coupons and other distribution channels hidden away or made inconvenient for higher paying customers. Part of pricing is capturing as much of the demand curve as you reasonably can.
Amen! If loving those things is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Open source re-implementation with bugfixes: https://openxcom.org/
Awesome, thanks for taking the time for that. I'll have a think on how to address all these points.

I guess part of me wants to help people that can't afford to pay anything (hence a useful free tier), and for people that can't afford to pay much, but this isn't the best strategy for maximising profit.
I think the key is your statement says "in some cases" and the parent quote is "trillions of dollars in tainted money".

I'm not arguing the banks are innocent here. Just that the author seems to be bucketing all of the different cases, that range from outright illegal activity to simply "suspicion", together.
While what they do is a bit more nuanced, they do cause a mess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327499

By reserving the domain they make it more likely you don't buy somewhere else and more likely that someone will spot the interest and front run you.

"By February 2007, the CEO of Go Daddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept."

The fact that they don't actually buy for a long time is not really interesting IMO.
Rather than “bank relationship,” a clearer phrase would be “existing bank loan.” https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020/05/where-... examines this:

> For this reason, we turn to testing the hypothesis that variation in the share of small businesses with existing bank financing explains the variation of PPP loans approved across states. The top panel of the figure below shows the share of small businesses with bank financing in 2019, while the bottom panel shows the share of firms receiving PPP loans.

> We can see that there is strong similarity in shading between the top and bottom panels, consistent with the lenders’ preference explanation. This relationship is further confirmed in unreported regressions. Our interpretation is that banks’ preference for their own customers causes the PPP to favor firms with existing lending relationships.
Right, so the first order problem is, “my self worth is in doubt.” And the second order problem is, “why am I busting my hump for these worthless do-nothings?”

Even if you manage not to sink into an existential pit of despair, some rabble rouser may incite the means of production to rebel against you, introducing an external existential threat. So the dignity you’re looking for may save your life, twice.

How do we do that, outside of intentional work slowdowns or Futurama suicide booths? Ever escalating consumption is the answer since WWII, but we are killing ourselves doing that. What else is there? You can start by doing all the things we never find the time to do. I don’t know how we solve that problem for the great grandkids, though. Probably involves space colonies. Mars would be a ridiculously massive jobs creation program.
I disagree with your conclusion. If landlords think owning land is too risky, they’ll sell their properties, supply will increase, prices will drop and new buyers will come in to take advantage of the low prices before the market inevitably recovers.

Owning land is lucrative in NYC and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
At this stage, simple phone calls and SMS should long be considered compromised... how long until there's a cultural shift towards encrypted messaging apps and audio?
no, what I'm arguing is that you may not know if you get selective information, potentially taken out of context, to advocate some cause that's actually harming the national interest.

Pretty trivial example, create a leak or scandal about a relatively minor issue that discredits a candidate that would have threatened the interests of China or Russia.
Do export bans even work?
I know a few property-owning/landlord families. They own multiple properties, both residential and commercial.

Some of those properties are profitable to rent out. Some are not. You rent out the profitable ones. You don't rent out the ones that are not profitable, you just wait until they're worth significantly more than what you paid for them. When they are, you sell them, and you buy more property. Each property leverages the subsequent properties, in terms of both the mortgage credit you have access to, and actual money gained accumulated from rent and sales.
Government mandated closure is hardly a description of "creative destruction".
Sounds more like Robot Jox than Gundam...
HSBC and the Ponzi Scheme Play
Maybe he wouldn't need a gun if his trade was legal and he could call the cops when people threaten him.
I'd think, as with any other sector - there was a shortage of cheap labour.
Mkultra seems pretty plausible to me, at least with the science they had at the time. LSD was making huge waves in the psychiatric community, and many humint objectives like interrogation and brainwashing are inherently applied psychology. LSD was a breakthrough tool that laid the psyche bare, if only they could discover how to harness it.

Combine that with amoral thinking about the cold war and "greater good" and it's understandable, yet reprehensible, that they dosed prisoners and johns in brothels.