skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an odd thing to see widely published. I'm at a company that had a rather detailed negative article written about us, and we were warned about it internally shortly before it was published, after the reporter had contacted us with details and questions. However, we didn't go public with a reaction until after it was out, since it seemed rather pointless to respond to something that hadn't been published yet, especially when we hadn't even seen it in full.

It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this, drawing attention to a story that might not even get that much traction. It seems like it would have been much easier to just let that story go out and respond with a simple "We've investigated this before and dispute the claims, except for these few unfortunate stories we can confirm happened, and here's how we will prevent them in the future." What on earth do they gain with a preemptive memo like this? Are they really scared of their employees leaking this? Would anyone even pick up a story of "someone's about to publish a bad article about Coinbase"?
Who knew you could make money off an IRC clone.
The wording here seems particularily unfortunate.

Actively "fact checking" a story that criticizes oneself sounds like a deep misunderstanding of conflicts of interest.
Curious if it became a chore or was it more of a relaxing pasttime?
they have that too...

https://expanscape.com/teenyserv/the-teenyserv-prototypes/
Sure, I cannot claim to defend Coinbase when I know nothing of the matter. But since news is inherently cherry-picked (after all, one cannot report on literally everything), there will generally be an inherent slant to the information provided, and such an inherent slant will likely tend more towards an optimization of metrics (clicks, engagement, ad revenue, subscriptions, etc) rather than perfect statistical representation of the baseline (which it turns out people are not excited to read about!).
Neither of those could happen since it was capped at 100 and the time to fill it was just below the timeout.
The Luck of Lansing
It's just nice to be able to make sweeping simplistic statements about a super complicated situation
This sounds like Brent’s method for root finding! Also very similar is his method for Unitarians minimization. I ported this into Clojure recently from Python / FORTRAN... not quite literate programming but well documented if you want to give it a peek. https://github.com/littleredcomputer/sicmutils/blob/master/s...
I wonder how the nyt feels about them posting it publicly? Is that something that's going to make them reconsider sharing details in future stories?

(I think it was probably the right choice either way given how serious the allegations appear to be, so this is just idle curiosity on my part).
If I may critique this, there were some parts that didn't work for me (the ribbon section the most [1]), and some of the words and other parts went by way too quickly to figure out what was going on: it would have been nicer to slow down and appreciate the scenery more in that time. The ending is also rather abrupt; the music really felt to me like it wanted a denouement after the climax instead of just... ending.

That said... holy crap that final sequence was amazing, easily making up for whatever issues I have with other parts of it.

[1] Mostly due to the "moving too fast to get a sense of the scene" problem, I think.
Looks super nice.

Out of curiosity: Is there a way to do commutative diagrams well with graphviz ? I'd instinctively prefer do do such diagrams in a declarative way and let a layout engine worry about making it look nice. However, I never had to dabble into area that makes heavy use of such diagrams – maybe it's just too hard to make look good for typesetting.

I also have a theory that it would be good to have a re-implementation of the graphviz core to it more modular and make extensions such as Quiver more feasible, as from an outside, layman's view graphviz is pretty old and does not necessarily work well in today's frameworks other than encapsulating it with lotsa layers above it.
Ask for the order. A salesman who doesn’t ask for the order is just bullshitting.
Being as transparent as possible and investigating complaints as they come up.

> three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase. All of those complaints were thoroughly investigated, one through an internal investigation and two by separate third-party investigators

Using third parties sounds like a good idea here.
Might be a use case for The Greatest Regex Trick Ever: http://www.rexegg.com/regex-best-trick.html

(which boils down to "trump|(what you want)" and then check the capture group to see if you got what you want).
> Let’s keep focused on building an amazing company together; we are hitting amazing new records on users, volume and revenue, and we have so much great work to do together.

Ignore any potential negativity, everything we do is great, all that matters is revenue, nothing bad ever happens hear, blah blah blah. Don't focus on the bad part, those are all lies!

The NYTimes article isn't released so I can't comment on the substance there, but this quote struck out to me, and makes me less likely to believe Coinbase.

EDIT: Adding this to clarify for later readers, apparently the above quote I took from the post has been removed from the main post.
A lot of line rider folks get this kind of reaction. I truly think there’s some kind of insecurity that gets triggered in people when they see someone doing something intricate and esoteric with obvious passion.

Is it a jealousy at not finding such a passion, or for being unable to dedicate sufficient time to make something of a similar scale? Is it that they see such passion as wasted because the subject in question doesn’t match their own interest? Do they not believe it is deserving of the eyes that are on it now?

You can speculate, but at the end of the day, making something, and showing it to the world like this, is an extreme vulnerability. The act of making something is often as valuable as the result itself.
I thought I was on Coinbase... and then I wondered why there were some completely ridiculous ads at the bottom of the page.

Is this company so cheap they can't even build themselves a website?
Hard to judge without the story published, but it also sounds like the company is frustrated it didn’t get line-editing power. This is in contrast to even showing gratefulness for being alerted about the story’s imminent publishing and probably being contacted for sources from all views. The company has invited more scrutiny; like a kid running up to parents saying, “Whatever my brother says, it’s not true.”
Fiber lasers are relatively easy to cool due to their high surface area. A 20kw industrial one is about a cubic meter box and just air cooled.
Then it seems it's time Salesforce finally picked up Okta, too :)
> It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this

"This is gonna be really bad, so we need to get out in front of it." That's what it sounds like to me.
Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities.

Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten alive by a wolf. You can't get more clear than that. If and when the hunter saves her, that's mostly for the benefit of the parent, not the kid.

I'll think you'll find that most children, even from a very early age (preschool and before), are quite capable of discerning fiction from reality, and adept at distinguishing and recognizing (if not understanding) the moral lessons. The problem, IMO, with many fairy tales isn't the gore but that neither the moral lesson nor the plots resonant; so the gore just seems gratuitous rather than punctuation. Nobody is afraid of wolves anymore (we killed them all generations ago), and we rarely if ever let kids out into the world without safety rails, even up to college. The latter wouldn't matter if kids feared wolves--the graphic detail would make the moral lesson stick, which is kinda the point--but they just aren't.

I think you'll also find that, especially in the U.S., we live in a ridiculously violent culture; violence that we at best only superficially disguise. It's not the guns dropping legions of "bad guys"--again, most children understand fiction--it's just... I dunno, violence as an end unto itself rather than a means...? Fairy tale gore in books is the last thing I would ever be concerned about. I've actively tried to read these sorts of stories to my kids, to add diversity to their diet, but they don't seem to ever get into it. I think maybe it's just too unbelievable and dull, not too raw. The modern world is too different, modern culture much more slick and appetizing, and they know it even at 3.
The rules of Tennis are much more discrete and mechanical than the rules of football.

For some examples, see the handball rule definition, the definition of when a penalty should be given when a foul occurs near the edge of the box, and the body parts that render an attacking player “offside”. What constitutes a foul vs a fair tackle, especially during set pieces. And, at what point in time should one draw the offside lines?

This year they’ve made enforcement of offsides extremely arbitrary, overturning goals by a distance smaller than the margin of error for the technology. The lines are drawn from players armpits. Armpits are a continuous body feature, and different humans have different dimensions.

In short, two good referees can review an identical event from omnipotent angles, and reasonably come to divergent conclusions.
I strongly recommend giving that Twitter thread a look (click the "see more tweets" to expand it), where author also explains why he had to write so many words. By "mental gymnastics" I assume you mean "needlessly drawn out argumentation/reasoning". The essays contain very little of that and are densely packed with arguments and links. Only exception is in Past IV where he gets technical explaining why China's data does not violate Benford's law as some have suggested. The tldr is that there is little evidence to support the charge of "deliberate cover-up" during initial outbreak or subsequent data fudging.
Terra – An always-on voice band that tracks your tone and energy through the day
Ask HN: Review of AdGuard for iOS, macOS and Android? Any Good Alternatives?
> We are committed to maintaining an environment that is safe, supportive and welcoming to employees of all backgrounds

I don’t think this is compatible with dismissing the struggle for human dignity in America as “politics”
Well, the whole press release / internal email smells of a company desperately trying to spin what they expect to be a very, very bad article. But this line jumped out at me twice:

> To be specific: Although the story will likely allege that a number of Black employees and contractors referenced in the story filed complaints with the company, only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.

This is the kind of thing that really leads me to distrust everything Coinbase is saying. Reading between the lines, I imagine that the complaints workers claim to have filed were ignored by management at some level of the process, or not filed on the right paperwork or something.

And so Coinbase can probably claim on a technicality “they didn’t file a complaint.”

But being “technically correct” is only what you reach for when you don’t have any other leg to stand on. It’s a really telling move that they repeated this line multiple times.

I’m speculating, obviously. The article isn’t out. But this isn’t my first rodeo, and this kind of corporate speak isn’t new. This kind of desperate spin only serves to underscore the fundamental truths of whatever the NYT is going to publish.

Otherwise... why bother dignifying it with such a response?
A useful distribution (for building anyway) would require all the headers and binaries from macOS, which wouldn’t be distributable, right? So you’d have to have enough of a free system to be able to get to the point where that stuff could be slurped out of a legit macOS installation. Sounds like an interesting challenge.
Create a City Building Game in Unity
I don't waste my time trying to appease people who are satisfied with nothing. The mob is more concerned with being outraged then the truth. Best to ignore it, which is where Coinbase made its mistake, imo.
These days you don't even get that on most occasions even in a "forgot password" flow. You still have you key in your email address or username again pretty much everywhere.
What would users like to use more?
Pretty much. They're going to pay the price for not being on-board with the woke agenda. We all knew this was coming. I do not expect any good faith coverage from the NYT (on any wokeness related topic they have no remaining journalistic integrity), although I hope to be pleasantly surprised.
They don’t need to. They just need to plant some doubt.
Is the game going to survive Flash's imminent end of life?

I spent way more time than I want to admit playing my favorite Flash game, Fantastic Contraption. I'm concerned that the possibly millions of hours of creativity that went into the thousands of levels and hundreds of thousands of solutions are going to go down with that ship in a couple months.

I guess the internet archive is working on supporting older games but I wonder how feature complete and bug-free that's likely to be
Show HN: Modernizing Legacy Computer Systems
You don't pay a third party to find damaging stuff about your company. Do you really think this third party would ever find something that made Coinbase look bad?

Arthur Andersen taught us that two decades ago.
If web apps "weren't fast and functional enough", users could run (native) programs instead.

There is nothing in that situation that necessitates an "App Store", through which Apple, instead of the iPhone owner, controls who can write, distribute and run programs on the computer, and profits from the work of third party developers.

When they extended this land grab to Apple laptops and desktops, was it because non-Apple approved applications "weren't fast and functional enough".
It's an excuse.

YouTube would not do this if CNN or MSNBC posted the exact same thing. The "fact checkers" would accept the video as new facts, or they would find some other way to be lenient.

Uneven enforcement is a great way to suppress an enemy. In terms of accuracy and bias, OAN is just like CNN and MSNBC, but on the other side of the political spectrum. (eh, maybe CNN is more extreme) Being a typical California tech giant, YouTube/Google has an obvious bias. OAN is the enemy.

Stuff like this happens far too often to be accidental or random.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198029
> when you get accused of racism, what can you even do?

Make sure nobody has any examples of you being racist
Let's assume that CB is really the entirely innocent and maligned party here. In such a world, how would their response have differed?
Your intuition gets you to the right place but I think it is a bit flawed.

Entropy must be described relative to a system and an arbitrary definition of macrostates and microstates. It actually has nothing to do with disorder or order, I used the term previously because it helps with intuition but it is actually categorically wrong.

For example for a system of 5 loaded dice that roll six 99% of the time. With a microstate defined as the value of each dice after a roll and a macrostate defined as the number of 6s.

With this system entropy goes up as you roll more sixes. Order also goes up with entropy. Entropy is an arbitrary concept that is defined relative to your choice of a "system", "macrostates" and "microstates." You can choose systems that have higher probabilities of being ordered like say magnetic cubes in a box versus regular cubes. The magnetic cubes are more likely to be stacked perfectly and that is defined as a higher entropic state even when there is "less" information needed to "describe" it.

I never read about information theory but I'm assuming that the choice of "system" in information theory is usually pretty simple as in you can have numbers like the dice, but you usually don't work with "loaded" dice. So under the case where the microstate of each entity has equal probability of occuring. In this case there is a direct relationship between whether data describing something can be compressed and the entropy of of that something. The higher the entropy the less it can be compressed.

Information places idealistic restrictions on microstates... However this is not the case in nature. If the microstate of our universe of atoms is defined as the cartesian coordinates of each atom. Then atoms have a tendency to coalesce into spheres (planets, starts, black holes) due to gravity and as a result each microstate does not have equal probability of occuring.

Planets are in fact a higher entropic state then the cloud of dust that the planet initially started out as. I can now describe all those atoms with in compressed form (a macrostate): "Planet." Thereby leading to an opposite relationship between compressibility and entropy. In this case the higher the entropy of a system the less information is needed to describe it.
Seems like someone at NYT wasn’t happy with Coinbase’s recent rejection of the politicization of the workplace (https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...)
I don't think any service was done as far as alerting them something would be published because it's generally obvious: anyone even slightly-relevant to the story is contacted by a journalist and asked to share information beforehand, and of course some fraction will share this occurrence with others.

But it's also true that they'd like to do as you claim, I think it's only fair skepticism is applied equally to both sides.
Lies are countered with facts, not generic dismissals. The post is textbook PR pointing to some unspecified inaccuracy which is supposed to cast doubt on the substance of the story. Then self-investigation and self-exoneration. Every company trying to cover up wrong doing writes the same thing.
Disappointed as a customer to see this nyt-is-bad preemptive pr defense and no substance action, as I guess as fits their mission statement, than a critical assessment of flaws etc. and description of improvements they’ll make going forward.
> Is that something that's going to make them reconsider sharing details in future stories?

It's a fair question, but I doubt it. While getting a hot scoop and dropping it with a bang is something that feels good (and sells papers, so to speak), it's not the driving force behind how a professional news org works. The NYT is a professional news org. One of the things a professional news orgs does is fact check, get statements, and give its sources a chance to respond.
I've been in touch with David on-and-off since college and I gotta say, he's been passionate about this as long as I've known him, he's extremely talented, and he's always working on fantastic, creative projects. I'm really excited to see this post on HN.
Finger crossed this is okay as a "Show HN" (there's a free chapter so I think it is ^_^;;;;)

But I'm psyched. This was a two year project collecting stories, researching techniques and historical context, then having Covid push through production schedules into complete disarray.
It’s super easy for most people
Or internal peripherals. If I want 20Tb of storage, and I don't want external chassis all over the place, I need a desktop with at least a couple of 3.5 bays.
Ya be sneaky
I'm curious how well the new Raspberry Pi 400 could be adapted as an effective screen-reader–optimized portable computer. No need to waste weight and battery power on the display.
They probably wouldn’t have responded preemptively.
To be fair, you're using a corporate blog post sharing an internal email responding to a story that hasn't been published yet, to jump to a series of unrelated conclusions. Namely, extrapolating that unobserved reactions to a story no one has read are a 'mob', and the 'mob' is 'outraged' instead of being concerned about 'the truth', and it'd be better for Coinbase to ignore it.

It's also striking that this reaction could be addressed at itself.

Stealing this from other posts above, apologies friends: under those assumptions, the disagreement you have with Coinbase's choice to address it is sufficient to negate your conclusion - if there is no mob, and no story, and the corporation is trying to get in advance of it, it's likely the story is damaging enough that they need to, it's not pleading with a 'mob'.
You respond with specific facts and supporting evidence, not nebulous dismissals, which is how guilty companies respond.
I’m skeptical. I’ve worked with the NYT on a few stories; they’re incredibly thorough, and don’t publish unsubstantiated trash.
The only thing I need to know is not to use it.
I would argue that your framing of that situation is itself politicized!
It almost seems like they have already read the article.
In C, for example, "if (foo != true)" is not necessarily equivalent to "if (!foo)" -- but the latter very probably reflects the author's intent more accurately.

For example, an int with the value 42 is logically a "truthy" value, but the test "if (foo != true)" will succeed. Someone who would write "if (foo != true)" very likely didn't know that, and should have written "if (!foo)".

On the other hand, blindly fixing bugs like that has a good chance of changing the program's behavior, and possibly breaking it.

(All this assumes that the identifier "true" is visible. In C, this requires "#include <stdbool.h>" -- unless the programmer defined it explicitly.)
Since we're all hip to this strategy these days, I have the same feeling as GP.
It seems to me that Coinbase is well aware of NYT's recent decline from paper of record to race-baiting propaganda, and knows that instead of being factual about numbers NYT will use weasel words to make it seem like Coinbase's entire company is run by "far right extremist racists" or whatever similar language. Of course, only time and the publication of the NYT article will tell, but given their recent track record I would absolutely not be surprised if it's written as an exaggerated hit piece full of emotional appeal rather than, well, news.
And that confirms it for me: Amazon is officially a Day 2 Company.

Happened faster than I thought, but based on reading the comments about people who work(ed) there, this seems cut and dried to me.
There are already well established flash archival projects which should keep flash alive forever.

I think the biggest issue was not the death of flash, but that many games used external resources and broke after those servers went down.
fake news nyt trying to punish him for not wanting to be political and his previous statements
> Reading between the lines, I imagine that the complaints workers claim to have filed were ignored by management at some level of the process, or not filed on the right paperwork or something.

Reading the lines (instead of between them) tells you that two of the complains were investigated by a third-party which found no evidence of wrong-doing.
Thats exactly what it is. Hey dad, the cops Are gonna knock on the door and arrest me so heads up.
I always enjoyed his dribbling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLVmBJEzXhk
Technically 100% uptime, as one of the two competing chains will pull ahead of the other. That chain has no down-time.

For there to be downtime in Bitcoin, there would need to be a rollback, where all (or most) miners go back to a previous block and mine from that point. This has only happened once, as far as I am aware (due to a bug in the protocol itself which needed correction).