skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a much more complicated topic than many are making it out to be. And this complication is why patents are weird.

Like let's look at it. The argument here is that it was funded with public money so the data should be public. As a big OSS person I really like this idea. But who should the data be open to (and what data)? Germany?[0] (the funder) The EU? {North Korea,South Korea,Iran,Vietnam,China,Russia}?(the accused) The world? Public usually refers to the citizens of the country but can also colloquially mean "human."

Then we have to consider money (or resources, capital, whatever you want to call it. Time and effort was spent doing this and there was a loss of resources by some party). Is it fair for company A/Country A to spend a year or research time and money and Company B/Country B to steal that and make a profit through it because they can sell it for cheaper (i.e. B stole resources from A, that A spent time producing)? Do we know about how it is being produced? Are they vetted? There's all kinds of complications here that not only include resource recuperation (i.e. ignoring the capitalism component, which we can't because you can't just burn resources (capital) indefinitely) but there are also safety concerns.

Lots of companies decline to issue patents because they don't often protect their production rights. Often what happens is that the company produces a patent and 1) another company uses that knowledge to create something similar but distinct enough or 2) produces the same product in a country that does not respect the former country's patents. 1) is basically that student that copied your homework but made things unique enough that they technically weren't plagiarizing (but did they cheat?) and 2) is someone who copy pasted your assignment and turned it into a different professor. I don't think people feel great about either of these, but slightly better with 1. But you can also see a situation where the cheater turns in the assignment first and you get accused of cheating. The whole process is a mess!

Patents are difficult enough when you're operating in one country but get way more complex when you introduce other countries into the situation. I do think there needs to be major patent reform and personally I'd love to live in a world where all scientific advancements are available to anyone, but I'm not sure such a situation can exist until we advance to a post scarcity world. We're all familiar with OSS here and you'll always see people saying things like "Facebook is using that person's code, they should be a good guy and kick back a few grand for the free work." That's because we don't live in a post scarcity world. But in the mean time (until we get there) let's not trivialize the situation and try to view things from the situation we're in and how to advance things towards the dream situation.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-va...
Slightly off topic... But can you share your nontech side gigs? Totally curious...
Amazon didn't create an environment that simultaneously infuriates the left ("FAKE NEWS RADICALIZING CONSERVATIVES") and the right ("CENSORING CONSERVATIVE OPIJNIONS") and everyone in between ("MY WORTHLESS PRIVACYH")
Have you lived in a city or a building infested with Airbnbs? It's a hell for a person to live in a building infested with Airbnbs. Also, not to mention that Airbnb was one of the major factors in driving rental and apartment prices up for long term renters/buyers. I would say Airbnb did more harm to actual people living in the city than Uber ever did. Airbnb willingly allowed people to own multiple properties and just rent them out on short term. There is a reason a lot of major cities in the world had to pass laws that would restrict people from listing their secondary properties on Airbnb and even then, I don't think Airbnb enforces those laws at all. But hey, they are a YC company and care about how people travel, so people eat that bullshit up. At least hedge funds don't pretend to be noble and tell us upfront that all they care about is making money.
Everyone wants to be that 1 in 10 lottery winner :) Every hero needs to conquer some villain (e.g. credit card debt). It makes the victory that much sweeter.
The older I get the more I empathy I have for people who aren’t as successful financially and the more I realize that I owe the majority of my own success to factors outside my control.
Alexanderson Award 2020
How do you tie a zero dimensional point goat? How do you know he's in the fence at all? How does he chew the grass? Where does the grass go?
FYI, they did take German money[0]. But there's still the question of what does "public" mean here.

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-va...
You don't have to immediately delete customer data.

Most service that has a limit cap will have a "grace period" of a couple of days during which the service does not work but the data is not deleted. That give your some time to get notified of the issue, and fix the problem/increase the limit.
John Oliver did an episode on this chicanery last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8
I suspect they were so caught up in the idiotic idea that you have to be logged in to Facebook to use the thing that they figured logging out would just make the thing useless, so why allow that? It still seems like having multiple users should have been thought about.
Thanks for the links. I have reviewed the first link some weeks back. From what I can tell, the judgement falls under the "casual dismissal" category. Aside from the fact that the judgement is loaded with clearly biased editorializations, it doesn't provide adequate justification for its findings. As an example:

> Challengers are allocated one per respective party or organization to each counting board.5
> The only challenger right specifically listed with respect to absent voter ballots is to observe the
> recording of absentee ballots on voting machines. M.C.L. § 168.733(1)(e)(i) (“A challenger may
> do 1 or more of the following: … Observe the recording of absent voter ballots on voting
> machines.”) This requirement was met at all times.6

"This requirement was met at all times". How was this finding reached? The footnotes referenced (5,6) does not provide any indication to how this was reached. Yet, this finding is in direct contradiction to the affidavits that were provided. On what evidence was this finding based?

Further, the judgement states:

> Even Plaintiffs’ “material” allegations could not possibly support their causes of action. If
> each and every one of the allegations were true (they are not true), at most, they relate to a small
> number of ballots, that could not possibly change the outcome of the election.

This is just factually not true, based on the number of hours of lack of meaningful observation, which would be hundreds of thousands of votes. Again, there is no indication in the judgement how this finding was reached.

THANK YOU however for providing these links. I have not yet looked at the other two and I will review them with the attention they deserve.
Instagram emailed me about their Terms update a month after I deleted my account
I permanently deleted my Instagram account on Nov 2nd because I wanted to get away from Facebook. I even took a video to show someone. Today I received an email about their Terms of Use update. Why do they still have my email/username?
The Google TV Chromecast is an Android OS just confirm which is why Stadia doesn't work on it yet. Although you can sideload the Stadia mobile app.
A lot of founders have a well off family that bails them out if they fail. This is something I learned only after my self financed startup failed and left me with debt for more than 10 years.
A not-insignificant portion of them turned out to be crackpots that you don't really want to associate with
New York City should copy New Jersey affordable housing, bring down rents
Of course there's "technically" enough water, but that's academic pedantry at that point. There's technically no such thing as peak oil either, but there is a point where it becomes economically infeasible to produce more oil, which is what the point of the reserves statistic is. Reserves aren't all oil known in existence, they're all oil that is known to be feasibly economic to get.

The problem with new cities is generally trying to move employment. Unless there is a specific reason to move employers tend to like clusters of other employers. Most planned cities without a specific employment reason either fail or become big suburbs.

Making it easier to move to other countries is not exactly within the realm of possibility, given that India is not in control of how the US makes legislation and pressure would pretty much result in backlash that would probably make the situation worse, not better.
> What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

This a cat & mouse game and the leaders constantly change. Sometimes the mice are ahead, sometimes the cats.
There will be significant difference in marketing and pricing.

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you and automatically subscribe to all iServices. iDarkness Air Max Pro is the future of personal Darkness reimagined.
Starting from $9999.
Telemetry included free of charge.
At least the regulators are very keen on that one. They've been having a lot of trouble getting into that space.
It genuinely blows my mind anyone who has written software couldn't have guessed at all of this from the beginning.

Uber PMs and engineers should be super proud. The fact that each user thinks that their one use-case is "all the app does" is fucking brilliant product design.

I've had over a thousand Uber rides (used it to commute) in 10+ countries and it's obvious there the way it seamlessly adjusts to each region but even otherwise I think I could have guessed just from the difference between SF and Seattle. There was a sort of joy of opening the app in a new region and finding unique options. Some sort of (maybe intentional) superstar-level product design.

Rickshaws in Seattle? Cash payment in India? Uber Taxi in SF? Sweet!
Finding peace in the day-to-day is a great way to find your way back to a good place. Allow yourself to do anything or nothing at all and not feel guilty about not being productive or even checking stuff off your to-do list. In fact, look at your to-do list and ask yourself if it's critical to your existence or happiness. If it doesn't bring you joy or ensure your continued existence - i.e. pays the bills, delete it from the list.
There is no "only" book, but The Anthropology of Childhood could be one choice. https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/05/thoughts-on-the-anthropol...
You should scratch below the surface because this isn't really explaining much - it does not sound like something that requires more than 100 people. Their legal team sounds like it should be twice that alone.

Or am I crazy?
In extreme cases, Airbnb will try to book you a hotel if they can’t find a suitable home to replace the cancelled one with.
Instead, government institutions which are funded by government, now serve government as their main client. Public, which pays government, not institutions, is not a priority. Effectively government became an entity which is not serving the public but only itself.
Hacker Interview-Gummo [video]
That reminds me of another great aphorism:

"Linux is a process, not a product." -- Ian Murdock
I just bought the book The Baby Owner's Manual [0] since I'll be in your position in ~6 months. I haven't read it yet but it got decent reviews. Curious to hear input from others.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594745978/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
>a lot of the companies on the Fortune 500 are considered good buys from a value investor perspective

That, I think, is a citation needed, since IIRC, F500 is derived from revenue not book value.
It's also a mostly solved problem because advertisers have budgets and it's common to implement globally distributed budget servers to avoid showing more ads than the advertiser paid for, despite tens of thousands of individual web servers needing to know which ads in their inventory have budget left.

It's a fun exercise similar to global rate-limiting/load-balancing.
Calculate the cost of Internet censorship worldwide
Travel will rebound and their last quarter bookings while down are recovering well.

They also have more “rooms” and any hotel chain without any of the capex or infrastructure costs so it’sa fantastic model that is light on cash and creates tremendous scale.

The pandemic forced them to cancel advertising, save a ton of cash, and realize that their brand is strong enough that advertising isn’t really needed in the traditional sense which improves their balance sheet for 2021 and 2022 and future years.
You can also get EKS Fargate so best of both worlds.

ECS is definitely more suited for small use cases however.
> AirBnB as originally conceived is something that would make the world better for a lot of people.

Like Couchsurfing before AirBNB destroyed it.
Unify Access to Cloud – Iterating on Identity-Based Management
Kotlin and Scala are closer to Java, so it makes sense it would be an easier sell to Java shops.

I don't use Clojure professionally, and have often wondered how well it holds up in companies where avg tenure of an engineer is 2-3 years.

I guess that assumes that a tenure of 2-3 years is not a problem in itself.
How is this the first time I have gained an intuitive feeling for refraction? Instead I've been taught to simply accept Snell's law. It feels very powerful that a single hypothesis - and a reasonable one at that (namely that the electrical field is continuous at the junction between materials) is enough to explain refraction!
Butler Lampson (Xerox PARC researcher who created the Alto) recently revised this classic paper from 1983, updating it for more modern systems and principles (e.g., eventual consistency).
You shouldn't read only one.

There are two kinds of books. One kind urges you to be more permissive; the other kind urges you to be more strict.

In Zion National Park, there's a trail called Angel's Landing. You wind up climbing this ridge, with a 1000-foot dropoff on one side, and a 500-foot dropoff on the other side. Parenting is like that. There's a cliff on the side of being too permissive. You read a book warning you about that. So you back well away from that cliff. But there's a cliff on the other side, too, and you become to strict by trying to not be too permissive.

Worse, if your natural bent (or upbringing, or whatever) is toward being too strict, then a book that warns about being too permissive resonates more with you than one that warns about being too strict, even though the second kind is the one that you really need to hear.

So, yeah. Beware becoming a parent of only one book.
Open Source Emulators
Goodreads API Being Retired
Just got an email about this today, as I had an API key:

Your Goodreads developer API key has been deactivated

Goodreads has deactivated the Goodreads developer API key associated with your Goodreads account as it has not been used in more than 30 days. As of December 8th 2020, Goodreads will no longer issue new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire these tools.

If you wish to provide feedback on this change, please complete the developer API survey here.

If you have additional questions, please review Goodreads help here.

Link to developer discussion:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/21788520-api-deprecatio...
Unless you're the father, the you can run sudo lightctl status room to check that bulb.
The walls in the garden continue to rise.
I find there to be people on both sides who exhibit a failure to think critically.

IMO, lockdown should not be a binary thing. Since things should be open. Others should probably remain closed while the infection rages. Masks, on the other hand, should be ubiquitous.
How would you implement it that there are real-world ramifications to breaking your law? For example, what if you are a Nigerian prince?

On a more serious note, do we have any data on how well the "do not call" list worked out?
Apple discontinues Music Memos app with one final update
I think XHTML allows to put anything inside anything. Not sure if it's legible, but DOM will be nested properly.
I agree with you. I was on Airbnb yesterday, looking for a cabin in the woods for the weekend. I couldn't find a good option, why? The good ones were already rented.
Why should I, a person who is not a large pharma company, care about this?
Hm, if it's based on this ratio of contour integrals, shouldn't it be possible to do better than this? Like why would it be so hard to find the residues for these poles? Shouldn't that be just a bit of formal Laurent series manipulation? What am I missing here?
Yeah I see the statement a lot on international forums like HN and Reddit of "SMS is still a thing? No one uses it!" But it's highly cultural. I only use WhatApp for two friends in Europe. Most of my friends here in the US use Facebook Messenger for our group chats. My iPhone-using friends use iMessage, but if I'm communicating with an Android-using friend, it's just plain SMS. I prefer more robust platforms but I also send hundreds of plain SMS messages each month. It's just easier than trying to figure out if they're on WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Discord, Telegraph, Hello/Allo/Duo/etc... everyone has SMS and everyone has a phone number so it's the lowest friction way to communicate.

That's what I love about these forums, is getting the cultural experiences of other people and finding out they're not always the same as your experiences. Very eye-opening.
> A founder’s earnest feelings about their business’s externalities should never be taken at face value.

Maybe that's your strategy to VC investing. I don't think it's particularly good to apply a zero or negative coefficient to this trait. But that's okay, the market shall speak on this one.
Google, Intel, Dell, Zoom, Slack Form Modern Computing Alliance
How Did Video Games Become a Service?
They do (well, you can have different listings limited to different regions).

But basically the only time I use Uber is when I travel to another region. I don't want 30 different Uber apps on my phone...
If you're not already familiar with Soft White Underbelly (interviews and portraits of the human condition), I highly recommend checking out Mark's other videos. I particularly enjoyed the recent series of folks from Appalachia.

https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftWhiteUnderbelly
Actually I think (I don't know that it's been tested in court) that this is a known security vulnerability in the GPL, as long as they only decline to do any further business with that customer (including renewing their subscription), rather than reneg on a already-agreed-to deal.
> Not really an exact [...] solution

But it is exact.

> Not really [a] closed form solution

It's my understanding that what is and isn't "closed form" is rather arbitrary. Functions which are used frequently – like exp() – are elevated to closed form status, and yet you can't evaluate exp() in a finite number of steps. So how is the explicit solution to the goat problem objectively different?
Consider an opposite suggestion- if we need an educated voting group for educated decisions, we should move to educate the entire voting bloc.
Microsoft’s New ‘Productivity Score’
I laughed so hard!

If somebody missed the reference: https://decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
Definitely the skulls of dead hoteliers.
They're getting suspicious, I guess. Here's what I know about funding these sorts of activities:

Greenpeace started out selling shirts and buttons and things which had a pretty quick turnaround. Then they began signing up middle and upper class people to donate $10+/mo regularly. At present greenpeace has at least a million such monthly donors of $10/mo or more. As the years wore on and they became famous, wealthy people began willing their estates to Greenpeace. It was all driven by their media and communications machine: iconic images of men and women in orange jumpsuits riding zodiacs into a hail of soviet whaler bullets and harpoons just to protect endangered whales. Of course this was pre-internet so their media was distributed by mail and telex. Greenpeace has probably spent millions on postage alone by now.

I feel comfortable sharing this knowledge because just knowing this is not enough to actually make a difference in the grand scheme of things. Even if OST gets funded, without a good lawyer this Xeno Kovah person could easily have it all stolen out from under his nose in an instant. Or the other members of his organization could turn on him and purge him. Or his board could just choose to ignore his vision and completely change the direction and shape of OST.

More money, more problems. All the money in the world won't make a difference if you don't have any skills managing such a large sum. And it's hard to find mentorship for such things because usually, consistently, your mentor will decide that you are dead weight and THE MENTOR should be in charge of the whole enterprise, not you. It takes much more than just money to succeed. So I feel completely comfortable discussing fundraising techniques.
Put another way, I care as much about pharma company profits as pharma companies care about my personal health.
Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375739 -

>>> The Weather Service held a public forum Tuesday to discuss the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the investment in computing infrastructure that would be required for these limits to not be necessary, agency officials said a one-time cost of about $1.5 million could avert rate limits. The NOAA budget for fiscal 2020 was $5.4 billion.

They do, in fact, appear to have the money.
> Do you remember 2008?

Honestly, I was in high school. So, no, not really. There were other reasons that no one would give me a credit card.

> It took a credit management service and ten years of steady payments, but I'm now out of (consumer) debt. Thankfully.

Wait, you mean the binder full of credit cards didn't work out to a billion-dollar company for you?!? That sucks. I guess we're 1 for 2 on that one today.... 50% chance of success. /s
It's not really that complex. All compute should shut down. All API calls should fail. Storage should be (optionally) preserved at normal cost.

Your examples are simple given this framework. Uploading/downloading data to storage is an API call. Monitoring is compute. Metric history storage is storage.
You can use it as a normal buffer. Run command, switch to visual, go copy and paste. Way nicer than `:r !command`.
Correct, and I’m taking those into account when saying “extensions shouldn’t even try to do this”.
dtrace has also been on macOS since 10.5, with a pretty nice GUI app as well. I’ve used it to trace ruby and python code to isolate slow API requests from the end user’s perspective.
The Latest on Coronavirus Mutations
Google breaks SMS on many Android phones, is rolling back changes now
My job before coding was working 12 hour days, 30 days at a time on a cement tug and barge. I'm never going back. I'll take all the on call you can give me.