skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
^ this guy gets it! IBM PC dominance didn't mean much when OS became the thing. And Windows PC OS dominance didn't mean much when web became the thing. Search dominance (which is one way of interacting with the web) didn't mean much when social/eCommerce (other ways) became a thing. FB missed messaging (is messenger a thing?). What are we doing here? can we just focus on figuring out digital privacy and call it a day?
Ask HN: How are the roles of engineers with Autism Spectrum Disorder different?
One of my acquaintances is doing a research project on autism. How are the roles of engineers with Autism Spectrum Disorder different? What parts do they perform particularly well in?
I have once had the unrealized ambition to buy an old drive-through teller bank location and open a burrito place where your food goes through that pneumatic money tube.
Would have been perfect for pandemics.
Question: when you say "I can't see why you couldn't use real numbers to represent utility", does your reasoning for that have anything to do with Dedekind cuts, Cauchy sequences, or complete ordered fields? Because that's what the real numbers _are_. If your reasoning has nothing to do with these sort of things, then it can't possibly be sound because in order to argue that X has such-and-such property, you need to know what X actually _is_.

To repeat an example I posted for someone else: Suppose there's something called a "superdollar". If you have a superdollar, you can use it to create an arbitrary number of dollars for yourself, any time you want, which you can trade for goods and services. If you want, you can also trade the superdollar itself. Now picture an environment with two buttons, one of which always rewards you one dollar, and the other of which always rewards you one superdollar. Shoe-horning this environment into traditional RL, you'd have to assign the superdollar button some finite reward, say a million. But then you would mislead the traditional-RL-agent into thinking a million dollars was as good as one superdollar, which clearly is not true.
This seems to be clickbait- they are simply doing away with local regulatory rules and falling back on the states protective laws? I would love if someone who knows more could post the applicable statutes and explain what was actually done here. The tone seems a tad editorialized in the linked article.
I wonder how many shorts are still hanging in there.

I imagine Elon is laughing a lot about this.
Listening to music costs $10 per month. Netflix is $15. Surely securing the keys to your digital life is worth at least $5.
I had included China and edited it out: I am unsure what the effective tax rate is for their national capital investment projects. Since the primary story was about tax, I didn't want to cloud things without knowing what Chinese salary tax effects were.
Reminds me of the Kubernetes source code comment.

// PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIMPLIFY THIS CODE.

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/pkg/con...
This is why I'm against increasing taxes in the USA. Europeans get more per tax dollar than we do. In the USA, we just waste the money. Europeans pay a bit more than we do, but they get a lot more back in terms of transit, health care, social safety net, etc. If our government can't use the money more efficiently, it shouldn't get even more.

Last time I rode on Amtrak it was absolutely depressing. Same with Caltrain and BART. The problem is not money -- other countries do more with less money. The problem is governance.
Remember when Verizon tried basically the same thing with go90?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go90

No? You don’t? Not a surprise. And nobody will remember Quibi either.
> The 1password developers should be auditing all updates to those dependencies too

This is just wishful thinking unless there's a public security audit against a specific version.

Funny you bring about blind trust when talking about a security sensitive app.
Previously (or perhaps in an alternate timeline): https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

The original article is more like a pneumatic cargo wagon. Pneumatic posts of much smaller diameter existed all over Europe before and after the larger one described in the OP:

https://www.warwickandwarwick.com/resources/articles-library...
For those looking for the rest of the series, it's here: https://www.mathventurepartners.com/blog?offset=157373689900...

This looks like a series on how to build a relatively straightforward operating model with a focus on cash balance and "founder value" (I guess that's attributable equity to the founder)

If you're interested in valuation, it's worth checking out Prof. Damodaran's work or an online resource such as Macabacus modeling guide: https://macabacus.com/operating-model/introduction
Steve Yegge's classic "eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout" [1] was published a few years after Meg's eBay tenure, and sums up the lousy UX they never tunnelled out of.

Meanwhile, every history of Amazon points out how their third-party seller project stole eBay's opportunity by focusing on customers first and building a unified product hierarchy.

eBay managed to hold on by being the first 2-sided marketplace to gain traction, enjoying a huge moat much like CraigsList. Over time, it squandered the opportunity.

Meg may know how to keep a company in operation, but she's never shown she can lead a product from scratch. That's just a giant risk to take with $billions of funding at stake.

1. https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebay-patents-10-cli...
Yes, it is ridiculous to criticize Java coders for "misusing" their OO mechanisms.

Those mechanisms are all they have, to build everything, whether OO makes sense in that niche or doesn't. So, probably more often than not, they are obliged to cobble together a substitute for what they need from the limited toolkit at hand, making a hammer do a screwdriver's job, as best they can.

You have to feel sorry for them, and even sometimes admire them, making the best of adversity in their impoverished language.

Then think of the poor C coders, lacking even that.
I learned C from the Lion's Commentary. I bought a license from Western Electric, sending in my $150 cashiers check (more than my rent check) twice because they ignored/lost the first one. Many samizdat copies were made and my copy was actually borrowed and used in the USL v BSDI lawsuit.

I did at one point understand that. The toughest thing for me to understand was kt assembly code.
>Humans don't receive infinite rewards because any "reward system" in our brain is implemented by receiving a finite amount of electrochemical pleasure signals over a finite amount of time.

This is like saying computers can't represent infinity because they have only finitely many bytes.

Suppose the treasury rewarded you a "superdollar", which is a special object that allows you to create any number of dollars that you want, on demand, as many times as you want. How many dollars would you say this superdollar is worth? Obviously, no finite number of dollars would be worth that one superdollar. The human mind can certainly understand the relative value of a superdollar vs. any number of dollars. That the human mind is implemented through finite electrochemical processes is irrelevant.
I met James Randi around 2007 when he came to campus at UBC to give a talk. He told the following story about a magic trick that he worked on for years, which concerned guessing the timing of his death. I haven't heard him tell that story elsewhere, so now seems like a good time to share it.

He said that for a good number of years, every time before going to bed, he would write on a little card that he predicted he would die that night during his sleep. In the morning, he got up and happily threw away the little card. Every day. For many years. His concept was that, on the rare chance that this actually happened to be last day, people would think that he pulled the ultimate magic trick. People would not suspect that he wrote this on a little card every day because, well, nobody does that.
TOR, at the moment, is based on TCP and since the whole architecture is based on the assumption of TCP, I don't see it changing anytime soon. QUIC means TOR is now "legacy" unless we just do the right thing and boycott QUIC.
Who knew the former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise wasn't a good choice to run an online entertainment media startup targeting young people?

'How do you do fellow kids?'
Config files should support comments. JSON is being wedged into use cases it simply wasn't designed for.
For me, it’s about transparency. I can see and inspect the raw data that’s sent to Microsoft. I can see only a dumbed down dashboard of what is sent to Google.
I like reductionist maths counter-proofs based on "x cannot contain y", but I try to be skeptical they apply, because it is plain real mathematicians can reason about infinite things, from finite symbols, as chains of symbols. the "cannot contain" set includes things I can state, but not enumerate.

I'm skeptical about AGI anyway. The proof is unnecessary, I tend to an even more reductionist model: Our lack of understanding where intelligence is, in the brain, goes to our failure to model it. "morally" making claims "its alive" based on a lack of understanding, is a bit like chemistry by alchemy. If you don't know why, you didn't make it any more than making a baby would have.

Feynman said it better: lots of physics proofs are built on partial models of sub-atomics, which if you ask questions about become unknowables too. Its turtles-all-the-way-down stuff.

traditional reinforcement learning will probably not yield AGI, any more than any current method, based on not understanding GI, and until we understand GI, I do not believe any connectionist, or learning model will derive it.
Some Thoughts on Windows 10
I was wondering if anyone else feels Windows 10 has degraded to such a point it's unlikely to get better. I had a bunch of updates forced on me last night that restarted my computer without permission and caused me to lose work. This morning, while in a conference call, I needed to fiddle with my sound settings (in the atrocious Settings app) to get my microphone and camera to work since the update dropped all my sound configurations. Actually, that app doesn't expose the listen to device settings I need so I must run mmsys.cpl. Then, later this evening, I came back from dinner and found that the computer restarted itself again causing me to lose more work. I'm not a Microsoft hater, but they are totally dropping the ball here. These updates have gotten insane. Have we reached a point where this is acceptable? I came back a month or so ago and found all my default apps had been reset and an Edge icon had been pinned to my taskbar. Tonight, while I'm trying to again figure out how to disable updates, I went into the Registry Editor (see photo), and it really hit me--this is amateur hour. It's not just that screenshot that looks ridiculous, it's everything. Windows has no consistency at any level anymore. It's almost like everyone who worked on the earlier versions has died. It's very sad. I'm wondering if anyone else has grown increasingly frustrated or has any predictions on what this will lead to.
I guess if google went full evil they'd have enough blackmail material to take down just about anybody at this point including politicians. The backlash if they were caught would be huge, but honestly what would we do about it? Switch to Bing who is just hoping to get enough data on us to do the same (and leveraging data collected from our own PCs to do it)?

They only way I can think of to solve this would be to limit the amount of data that companies are allowed to collect, but can we expect the government to vote for that until google does start to abuse what they have on us? Right now they can take that data and benefit from it as well.
>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha.

When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail.

The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms.

(In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries)

This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.
I feel you on this. I found out I had kidney cancer after my appendix decided it was time to go. I only had 3% of my left kidney removed and that is it. No chemo or anything just sore for a few weeks.

And man do I have guilt and felt like a fake cancer survivor. My experience was so minimal compared to a lot of people. But I realized I am a cancer survivor because of all the mental anguish cancer puts on me. It’s nothing I can ever explain, it is just this super terrible feeling of not knowing. Is my cough metastasized cancer? Probably not but my mind sure loves to think so. Having to deal with my own mortality was a big thing. I wonder if dying of old age causes as much stress and anxiety as knowing you have cancer and could die.
Why the U.S. Navy Manages a Forest
People forget that early on masks were almost impossible to get. And hospitals needed what few could be found.

So telling people to wear what they couldn’t get was awkward.
Guix: Securing Updates
It's an unlikely comparison in the first place; who is considering, on one hand, using SQLite right on the client device, and on the other, maybe spinning up a graph database that will almost certainly not just run on the client device? I submit that it's next to nobody. You can run SQLite on a server, but nearly nobody does that either (and not without reason). The idea that recursive CTEs are some sort of arcane technique that's impossible to debug is also not my experience with them at all.
FYI: "-vcodec copy -acodec copy"
It's an engineering mistake that it expired, but bad luck that it expired today.

(That said, everyone makes mistakes now and again)
This is very strange. I have over 480 and never experienced delays in anywhere (MacOS, Android, iOS). Searches only take a second or two once you've started typing in two characters in the search box.
The problem is that in YAML, white space is significant. How is a formatted supposed to know:

key1: value1 key2: value2

...is supposed to be:

key1: value1
key2: value2

? How is it supposed to know if the first is actually what you meant to write?

In grammars that aren’t white space dependent (such as JSON), it’s clear what this means:

{ "key1": "value1", "key2": "value2" }
>Die Nachrichtendienste sollten in digitalen Bereich dieselben Möglichkeiten bekommen, die sie im analogen bereits haben

translated: "Intelligence agencies ought to have the same capacities in the digital sphere that they have in the analog world."

Going to be an unpopular opinion here but i agree with this. I don't think there is any precedent for impenetrable private communication legally or culturally. Capacity to say, tap a phone or surveil communication has existed, of course with a warrant and strict legal checks.

People who want to argue against this need to make a case why legal or cultural standards should adopt to a technology, rather than arguing from technological capacity backwards.
"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"

An arrow <-- uptown downtown --> could work in most spots. Or an accurate compass that is tilted 20 degrees from the actual streets, still helpful. Or:

36th
^
|

9th<-- 35&8 -->7th

|
v
34th
The ability to do something like run with the screen off is not "premium", but it is being sold that way. "Hostage negotiation" is obviously hyperbole, but it gets the point across that it is neither paying for content nor paying for actual premium features. It's paying for them to stop being purposefully annoying.
For some people, any meeting is harder than writing 1000 line bug free PRs. That's probably the best summary.
Try snapfeel.com ,it's better than Tiktok and Quibi
Thanks for this - you're a phenomenal writer. Informative, funny at times, and most importantly vulnerable. Glad to see you're doing well!
Not to pick on you, but this statement shows what hurdles of habit and misconception that electric vehicles have to overcome. But it cuts both ways: I think the EV community could do a much better job of communicating and normalizing the EV ownership experience.
Is it useful to have a startup financial model if you're still at the early stages?

I've analyzed over 480 founder interviews (mostly for their acquisition channels [1]) and there's 1 adjective that defines their growth: "messy". They pitched a bunch of journalists, did a trial & error for 100s of ads on FB/Google, had search traffic after 6 months of trying (but 0 before that) and so on.

There's a sub-headline in the article that says "Why Should Founders Care about Building a Financial Model?"...I think a more important question is "WHEN"?

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com
Did you actually get a chance to see their questions? I wouldn't have posted my comment if they were less invasive or if people could skip more of them. But they seemed too invasive to me. They didn't even try to (to give just one example) request age ranges like many other demographic surveys do, instead asking for exactly how many years old you are, which seemed kind of unnecessary. I wouldn't be surprised if some subset of their data points were sufficient to identify a decent number of people uniquely.
Exactly I didn't always use Google I switched to their products because it was better than the competition; I used to use Yahoo mail but it sucked, so I switched to Gmail. I used to use Ask.com but it gave inferior results to Google Search. I have tried Bing and it was inferior so I continue to use Google Search. I use Android because its more open then the competition iOS.

When Google is not the best I don't use it. I use Audible and Kindle not Google Play Books. I use a opensource pod catcher I like rather than what ever the google android podcast app is. I use Open/LibreOffice rather than Google Docs. I have Chrome installed, but can't remember the last time I opened it as I much prefer Firefox as my daily driver because its superior in the measures I care about extensions, customization, and privacy.

Google only has me a as a customer as long as they offer me better service, if they don't I go elsewhere easily.
Then why bother selling the electricity back to the grid? If the wholesale price is less than retail price, it would make more sense to use the power to offset the original consumption.

It seems like the only reason a setup like this would really make sense is as an efficiency improvement for the industrial customer. Maybe financing for these types of upgrades is hard to come by, in which case it kinda makes sense to have a 3rd party own and operate the equipment. But that seems like a short term niche. As soon as it is proven and de-risked financing should be quick to follow.
Also what is the concern here? Is it that the investor will take advantage of you if they don't think you're financially savvy, or that they won't invest?

If it's the former then you need to know your shit because any superficial signaling will evaporate within the first meeting. If it's the latter, then the investors are circle-jerking morons by valuing financial savvy over strength in product, engineering, operations, or even charisma.
The big reason is because the US spends an amount of money equivalent to Jeff Bezos’ entire net worth (~200B USD) every 80 days on its military.

Amtrak’s annual revenue is less than 4B USD.

On that basis, I agree with you wholeheartedly. It would be nice to use some of that massive amount of money for infrastructure, versus funneling it to a dozen companies who exist solely to consume as much of it as possible.
I worked at ebay. Every conversation about Meg went like this, "Meg, who got 10 cent options ..."
But there's nothing stopping anyone from starting the "anti-racist sandwich shop"?
Early Adopters: Be Picky About Who You Serve
I really enjoyed this, smaller SRE groups in smaller companies may not be the same as Google, but the philosophical dna should at least match.
I'm not sure what the trade-offs are for drinking milk (aside from the obvious ones like calcium intake and methane production), but I am almost certain that milk drinkers will be vilified. We seem to live in a rage-driven world, where you're on one team or the other, and agnosticism is unacceptable.
Which is why, in retrospect, Tesla building a luxury sedan that was the fastest production car for a while was the right way to start the business.
I think even that is a reasonable comment to make. It's criticism of things that don't impact your decision (as in the comment I responded to) that offer negative value, in my view.
I tried containers for a while, but I didn't really trust the separation, and I also wanted the browser to be separated from my regular homedir/user.

So now I have a script to create/remove new UNIX users with a pre-configured firefox profile and a script to run the firefox under that user.

It has some quirks, but also some benefits. Mainly that the browser doesn't have access to all files on my computer, and the separation between profiles is enforced by the OS, which I trust more.
I once had a very severe case of insomnia I thought was caused by some medication.

It was such a difficult time for me, and after going through so many different solutions, I eventually discovered a book written by a Harvard doctor that had successfully stopped insomnia in hundreds of patients over several years.

Basically, he discovered that most insomnia is caused by belief. It becomes a vicious cycle that feeds into itself.

I didn't believe it at first. It seems so real, so profoundly difficult for me, but I was desperate and willing to try anything.

So I did. I followed the program precisely as laid out in the book. Made an Excel sheet and everything and gradually through cognitive behavioral therapy, I challenged the thoughts that I would never be able to successfully sleep again (along with careful measuring).

We tense up when we feel anxious. I can imagine that during times of great stress, the body reacts in certain ways that causes certain muscles to stay stuck or not heal, or even just have perceptional problems.

There's already a precedent for it with insomnia. It makes sense.

Thanks for the book recommendation.
Afaict this article is not at all about backdoors(things whatsapp/facebook has to provide) but about device surveillance, putting itself between e2e and humans
The article was gone?
It is hard to imagine such a miserable experience, shaping things written to do one thing well into other things doing something else less well, and again, never working with code that is exactly right for its purpose because it was expediently pressed into service against its nature.

After long enough, the overwhelming majority of code in the system is doing nothing it was designed for, just well enough to get by and get on.
Well, no, since they have to pay for the payouts somehow, they will need to be exchanging those crypto balances for fiat somehow.
Tja: “Rules for thee but not for me”