skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a shame, another reason "MS has changed" is less true than some would like to think.
What percentage of people who want the freedom to ignore virus precautions do you think are also willing to pay to subsidize others staying home? I'm not optimistic it would be large.

The solution you suggest would be equivalent to a permanent Red Hour, with those bent on damaging themselves and others roaming the streets at will, while those with any sense cringe helplessly indoors, starving to death. "Nuanced" is not the word I would use to describe it.
So much of the internet is gathered under Cloudflare, a single failure point.

It's worrisome that Cloudflare has a DNS provider, a domain registrar, a certificate authority, and a Border Gateway Protocol system. They can redirect traffic of any site to Cloudflare, generate a fake TLS cert that decrypts the traffic, observe or modify the traffic, and send it on to the destination site. Worse, they could be ordered to do this by a government.

What could possibly go wrong?
I think you're overstating the difficulty of avoiding those companies, at least if you're a reasonably affluent software engineer. I definitely don't do any business with IBM and I'd kill it if it came up at work because IBM is not that great. Weapons production is not that big a deal to me but I happen to not own a Mitsubishi or whatever so I get that one for free. I don't buy bottled water from Nestle and frankly they are pretty bad at making chocolate. I don't buy that nasty office brand coffee either. I don't watch a lot of TV, and I avoid drugs and the medical system as much as I can, by trying to live healthily.

So, I'm already "boycotting" almost every company you listed, without even needing any ideological goal to chase after. The fact is these giant evil mega-conglomerates aren't that great at making things. The more you avoid them the better off you will be.

Now, everything is connected to everything else, so I think the following rules are reasonable for avoiding evil companies:

- If it's a commodity, and it's mixed in with all the other commodities, it's probably not practical to separate the tainted stuff from the cleanly produced stuff.

- If it's a specific company with a specific product that they have specifically done evil stuff to push, that's an example of something to avoid.

- If the same people are in power as when the company was evil, it's probably still evil. If everything but the name has changed maybe they can get another chance. For degrees of change in-between those two, use your judgement.
This doesn't align with my tracking of virus facts.

1) the death rate is still unclear because very few localities have done sufficient and/or the right kind of testing to answer this in a definitive way.

2) initial estimates about hospitalization across age cohorts seem to have turned out to be fairly far off. Tracking the stats for my own state (New Mexico; admittedly a fairly small population), we sometimes have almost flat hospitalization rates across age cohorts.

That report was dated 16-24 February 2020. It was authoritative at the time of writing (hard not to be given the limited breakouts outside of Wuhan at that time), and the reporting on the physical structure and mechanisms of the virus have remained largely unchanged AFAIK.

But the epidemiological aspects of covid19 have, I think, changed quite a bit since that report. The report doesn't in fact coe down strongly in favor of masks:

"The relative importance of non-pharmaceutical control measures including masks, hand hygiene, and social distancing require further research to quantify their impact."

and in the section titled "Knowledge Gaps" includes "Effectiveness of the public health control measures and their socio-economic impact ... * Wearing mask in general public", along with most "lockdown" type policies.
If you are on W-2, there is exactly one person who you are truly accountable to at work: your supervisor. This is the person who was given an amount of money to do a task, chose to hire a person with some of it, and chose you to be that person. Your list of priorities at work needs to flow from or be approved by that person.
Seems pretty obvious to me what's going on. These "UFOs" must have been caught on camera by spy satellites. The reason they don't tell us about it is because it's miltech experiments.

Tales about them doing things way beyond the capabilities of human technology are either (1) someone being mistaken because the visibility is poor or they are on drugs or whatever. (2) Exaggerations for a good story. Or (3) disinfo to scare the Russians.
If you use work materials to work on your side project, your employer can make a claim to it. This is why you should always have a separate personal computer for personal stuff, and a work machine you use for only for work stuff.
I recently bought a "ninja" keyboard, where the labels are on the front of the keys, not the top. Looks "badass" according to a nearby 15-year-old. While the keys are technically labeled, in practice looking at them is useless, especially in anything less than bright room lighting, so they are, for me, effectively blank.

As a touch typist for many years, I found that for prose it was basically no change. But. There were enough things that were a total drag that I couldn't keep using it. There are times when the key you need to hit isn't part of a flow, and you have to hit it perfectly: passwords, Illustrator/Photoshop commands, punctuation-heavy inputs like URLs, etc. I'm not a programmer, and others will have other things they do.

So, I bought keycaps with letters and numbers on them and replaced them on just those keys. Much better.
Elon Musk’s Earth-to-Earth Rocket Design Will Be Used to Deliver Weapons for DoD
Hey thanks for the support! I'll definitely be adding some way of uploading your own stuff in the future, though it may not be ready for a while yet. Thanks again!
No there's a real distinction, to the point that protecting citizens isn't a part of their job, legally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
This book is said to be quite good: https://www.amazon.com/Biggest-Bluff-Learned-Attention-Maste...
When I grew up (1970s) I had 2 friends had very very similar houses in a town outside boston. They were similar to my dentist too, who had his office attached to his house. They all lived miles apart.

They were a 60's prefab house called a "deck" house. My dad ended up buying one later with a large addition once my parents split. They were pretty good, except the roofs which weren't great for snow (pitch) and lacked insulation. I helped replace one of those roofs and the lack of pitch made it easier to work on. (friends father was a civil engineer).

Pretty well made, considering, and the open layouts were pretty great.

prefab is around, just a niche.

A check of google, "deck" company still exist as a branch of a larger prefab house company:

https://www.deckhouse.com/brand/deck-house/

photos of one:

http://modernmass.com/concord-deck-house/
Where I live I pay one bill, and that gives me unlimited bandwidth on my home fibre connection, mine and my wife's mobiles, and unlimited minutes and text messages. I've used the same free email provider for 20 years!

>what is mind boggling

What's your phone number? I'll txt you every 10 minutes for a month. And you'll pay for it. Like it or not. Mind boggling.
I really hope it's satire, but based on those tweets shared in the other comment, I don't think it is.

The problem is that the views and practices here are just within the range of views I've actually seen interviewers and hiring managers express. And that's more damning of our industry's hiring practices than the person who wrote this.
It is interesting reading the comments. It's funny too because I would say most of the time people advocate others to create side projects because you never know if it will become the next big thing. Obviously there are some amazing success stories here related to side projects, but I wonder if that's just luck. Is the actual success rate of a side project going viral just as unlikely, for example, as a young basketball player getting a contract and going pro? (which is a scenario most people actively discourage pursuing)
Hmm wondering if I could make a bot to fake/overwhelm a system like this. Like be a rediculous demographic that doesn't exist.

Bot detection is sooooooooo strong though. Especially if someone wants to stop you.
Put this in my `~./xonshrc` a while ago

from pathlib import Path
from xonsh.events import events
class CwdPath(type(Path())):
def __iter__(self):
return self.iterdir()

$cwd = CwdPath.cwd()

@events.on_chdir
def set_cwd(olddir, newdir, **kw):
$cwd = CwdPath(newdir)

It's really nice being to do

for f in $cwd:
echo @(f.name)

or equivalent, especially with python's glob syntax

for f in $cwd.glob("**/*.png"):
#Do a thing

Overall I've been really enjoying xonsh, now that I've got the hand of it.
people should be weary of any feelings on WFH developed in pandemic era. i mean, i think video meetings will suck either way, and yes it distances you from your coworkers. but this is not normal WFH; people aren’t getting much social interaction anywhere.

having worked from home for the past few years, I’ve grown to love the minimal social interactions of remote work. i get my work done faster, and i’m more excited to see friends because i’m less exhausted. obviously, things are a little different now stuck at home most of the time...
I read Arthashastra last year and had mixed feelings about the book at the end. It has a Machiavellian-type determination for success but also holds fast to the belief that the circumstances of one's birth determines their potential.

Certainly some wisdom in ancient writings but need to be taken with a grain of salt.
thx, I misunderstood what it does
Airbnb is my favorite way to travel to rural areas and tier 2/3 cities. The people renting are doing what was intended - rent a place out where the only other options are crappy motels, driving more economic activity to their communities and monetizing an unused asset.

However the last times I used Airbnb in major cities it did not go well. In SF I had to do this weird “pretend I’m not an Airbnb traveler” to get past the front desk, which I had to do even though I didn’t want to because I had made no other plans. They didn’t tell me that scheme until I got close. In NYC some guy rented his condo but clearly that wasn’t allowed, he said I had to get luggage into the room ASAP.

It’s obvious that a huge amount of Airbnb is just regulatory arbitrage. People don’t want their buildings turning into hotels, which is what Airbnb enables, and the political wind is blowing against them now. I don’t see them having much success in major cities anymore, unless they sell to small time hotel operators as a booking and management platform.
The New Brazil
> In business, science, philosophy - the first objective is to define your goals.

How many times have you seen someone actually write out their utility function? Or agree on a single number on which the results of an A/B test will be based, regardless of other metrics? Defining your goals is an admirable objective, but it's not commonly done to the degree you're proposing.

All else equal, we want to preserve the maximum number of human lives, prevent the maximum damage to the economy possible, and provide maximum human freedom. Quantitatively defining the tradeoffs there is basically impossible.

What's much more common is proposing a few options, and listing out how each options affects the metrics you care about, then deciding an option.

Said more explicitly, it's easier subjectively to pick a point on a rigorously found pareto frontier than to subjectively define a utility function to be rigorously optimized.
> its better to use new tech in real job instead of side projects.

Lol this is why so many tech stacks at work go to shit. Someone wanting to add another bullet point to the resume and instead of doing it at home, they force a new tool/language at work (when possible).
Indeed, which is why I consider excess mortality numbers to be the most useful numbers on death rate that we have, although I have still not found an excellent breakdown on what they show (notably by age cohort).
> By the sounds of it playstation 'owners' were paid compensation, but could not get the Linux feature back, in other words they were not made whole.

Members of the class could opt out of the settlement and sue Sony individually. A court could theoretically enjoin Sony to restore the feature for those individual plaintiffs, but the plaintiffs would have to show that monetary damages would be insufficient. Generally courts don’t like to force defendants to do things when paying money would be an acceptable outcome.

> In my view this Sony case looks like compensation for breach of a lease-like contract.

I haven’t read the complaint in that case but the plaintiffs probably alleged a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. So, yes, possibly a breach of contract claim but not a lease. (Note: A lease is a specific form of contract in which a lessor transfers possession of property to a lessee, but retains a future interest in the property after the contract term ends.)
As someone who has worked at a few of the "top 10 banks in NYC" for most of my career (and still am...albeit trying to desperately get out), I have to say that the quality of much of the engineering talent at these firms, and the typical candidates that would apply there, are pretty low. Yes, I realize that the above statement can be construed as spitting on my own face in a way. So I am not surprised.

There may be a few small niches that attract good quality talent, but otherwise I don't know why anyone would opt to work as a technologist at a bank as opposed to say, a bonafide real tech company (all the banks are eager to say they are "tech companies" nowadays), or even a hedge fund.
Thanks for the explanation: now it seems to me the comparison is not perfect but still meaningful.
These aren't editorials, and the articles aren't written like editorials.

> "First, a Vaccine Approval. Then 'Chaos and Confusion'."

The subhead gives a better description of what the article is about "Come spring, Americans may have their choice of several so-so coronavirus vaccines — with no way of knowing which one is best." The article is centered on conversations with experts on what that will mean for individuals.

> "The comments from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came after the White House tripped over itself on the issue of Afghanistan troop levels in recent days."

This is an article reporting on comments made by a high-level government official.

> "Rooted in Faith, Barrett Presents a New Conservatism"

> "She is a stark departure from traditional Supreme Court Nominees."

These are both from the same entry/article, about Amy Coney Barrett's background and resumé.

---

None of these articles are completely devoid from the reporter's opinions. However, I don't think it's possible to explain these issues in a completely neutral way.

Let's take that last article, since you quoted it twice. The statement that Amy Coney Barrett is "a stark departure from traditional Supreme Court Nominees." is not a scientific fact. However, the article goes on to detail the ways in which she's unusual—she's young, for starters, and from the south, and she's spent much of her career teaching rather than working in governmental positions. That is unusual for supreme court justices, and I think it should be reported on.

The NYT's actual editorials are written in a distinctly different manner, which I think will become obvious if you spend a a few moments reading them. The article's goal is explicitly to advocate for one position.
This kind of problem is ubiquitous in native software. Any program that takes user input and is not written in a memory safe language is likely to be exploitable in this way.

This is doubly true for programs that execute user scripts. And it is inevitable for programs that support binary file embedding and file manipulation through those scripts - a feature some users of Word actually use.
Yahoo Groups shutting down December 15, 2020
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952
Consciousness Is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose)
It can be both, depending on the situation.
Agree -- recruiters don't care about side projects. But, if you hustle and track down the hiring manager they might be impressed, and at a minimum it could be a good conversation starter.

My side projects have opened a lot of doors for me, particularly they have enabled career switches. I'm a B2C product manager, was interested in moving to B2B and was ignored until I launched a small SaaS side project (B2B vs B2C PM is considered quite different.)

But the theme of this article is true, recruiters don't care and you should focus on enjoyable side projects.
Just to reground the rhetoric, we are talking about facebook removing posts by people that try to convince others that one of the largest genocides in human history didn't happen, not about all that other stuff.
I live in NYC and renting a car, either with a car rental agency or via ZipCar is an utter shitshow.

With ZipCar, the cars are usually either (1) changed last minute to a different garage, (2) have mechanical issues (I showed up once and the battery was dead), or (3) strong smell of smoking. A few times I have had multiple of them occur in the same reservation (the third garage we were sent to had a functioning car with check engine alerts).

I have tried rental cars, but then what if you want to go away for a week at a time? What if the car doesn't have an EZ-Pass? How do you get to your final destination from the car rental place? A few months ago I waited one hour for a Lyft driver to pick me up (in a jalopy van on a toll-less route with no AC) to take me to the car rental place.

There is something to be said of having a functioning car waiting for you near your place of residence, even if it is only for 5% of the time. I imagine the same applies to other things in life.
I think there is a huge difference between what the author mentions as "shallow" side projects (where you are just trying to mess around with some new tech), and side projects where the aim is to develop a legit product. I imagine the latter, when seen all the way through, is much more attractive to recruiters. Although, I don't have any solid anecdotal experience with recruiting to validate that claim.

I just think it's important to not classify all projects outside of your job as "shallow" side projects, and then completely discard them career wise like the article seems to be doing.
How many people are hired through standard recruitment process and how many people are hired by impressed CEO?
I would choose the one you can't stop thinking about. Or the one that many of the other side projects eventually lead to. If you feel similarly about all 100 side projects, probably none of them are worth doubling down on.
It’s interesting how the author equates independence with leftist ideology. That seems more libertarian to me, leftist support of government expansion is more authoritarian. Ideally a career is a launch pad to a business, or else what are we all doing here?
Tabs is obviously the right way :). It allows for setting 1 tab = N space. Faster natigation, better search and replace. It expresses intent much better. The issue is that lot of editors, formatters etc implement this so badly that there is little choice for everyone but to be forced to lower yourself to lowest common denominator and use spaces. That giant button taking up so much space on most keyboards largly gets unused :(.
Why keep the fight going after losing the war for server market?
Microsoft's inertia is generation specific.

My father (70) and his cohort will basically only use outlook while my nieces and nephews (~18) when they get into the business world, they're not only unlikely to have any loyalty to outlook and office but they're unlikely to use email as a first tier communication and may not even use traditional word processing packages as a primary method of long form expression.

Nor will they have any of the branding impressions my father's generation had. A chromebook, macbook, or really anything else will be accepted as "alright, I guess I'm using this".

The desktop metaphor is quite stable as is the software. They will be, and arguably have been for ten years, broadly interchangeable.

Microsoft's current positioning is like 1980s IBM. The mainframe strategy worked so long as the people running the business thought they needed mainframes. As they retired out, IBM had to go elsewhere for profits.

And I'd bet the farm Microsoft knows this. They've diversified into video games, source code management, cloud computing, etc seeing this future ahead.

Also this isn't new for them. They're replaying their strategy from 1975-~1990. They never had the better products, they won because they had the better strategy.

Office was a good cash cow, but it's increasingly becoming a harder fit
Well the Daily is the independent student newspaper and has little to do with official University policy. I don't know what FSI is, perhaps some department that Bhattarcharya is part of. I agree, if it was being pushed by official Stanford news sources (a search for Bhattarcharya on https://news.stanford.edu/ reveals nothing, although plenty of other COVID-related research), that that might be problematic. I agree it's not a good look for Stanford, but but if people conflate researchers from a university with a university, then that's on them.
This is the paradox of choice. In most cases, it doesn't pay to spend your time hemming and hawing about find the perfect project. It helps to just pick one, even if it's the stupidest idea of the lot.

The alternative is to wind up as Burdian's Ass, who is equally hungry and thirsty, can't decide whether to eat hay or drink water, and so dies of hunger and thirst.
I am confident that none of the people who downvoted such a comment believe the Holocaust was faked.
Fairly severe, but it worked for Australia. Victoria got well defined goals for metro and regional areas. Now regional Vic is more or less open. Metro is close to threshold but lagging with just under 10 cases a day.
Look at where exactly? The only equivalent to Broadway I know of is London's West End, and they don't have open policies.
Yeah, managers just don't get the ego feeding they need in video conferences.
The problem with intelligent early discard is the potential cost of missing something cleverly disguised, that might be seen by an analyst, but not by an AI program. Equivalently, were AI to advance to the point of dispensing with the analyst layer, it would probably run on physically large machines. Perhaps we should concentrate on very high bandwidth transmission to the ground.
> it’s a dangerously misleading number to anyone who has a large fraction of their personal wealth invested in AirBnB

Nobody rational with a significant amount of their wealth in a $30bn company hasn't already taken some chips off the table. Whether through cash bonuses, loans, tendered shares or secondary sales.
My mom is in a memory ward. The access to visitors is extremely limited. At one point we could only visit through a window to wave hello. Now, visitors are allowed in certain areas. But it's not foolproof and I'm sure if there's an outbreak there will be a lot of casualties unfortunately.
As a hiring manager, I never cared about side projects, or Stack Overflow or Kaggle scores. The most a side project github link would tell me if it was big or not. That’s it.

I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read.

Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spend your free time coding, instead of hiking, or some other hobby.