skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How ethical are pre-sales? Have you ever pre-sold a product?
Pre-sales are becoming a popular funding strategy for companies, and its effectively 0 interest loans from your prospective users. I am considering to do one.

But Fake Door testing isn't quite ethical.
You are selling a product you haven't made yet.
Someone might steal your idea before it takes off.
You need an audience.

What is your opinion on pre-selling products and the new paid waitlists trend?
We plan on supporting it, but don't have a definite date for it as of yet.
Decentralized exchanges still have lots of issues that would prevent a serious investor from using it. And sidestepping KYC/AML regulations is not an option for any institutional investor.
I would imagine the extra power use probably isn't enough to outweigh the environmental costs of manufacturing new hardware, at least for your average consumer device. For servers, maybe the higher power usage is sufficiently high for it to be beneficial?
Hi,

just FYI, I saw that you are setting third party cookies without consent. While I generally don't like the flood of cookie banners, it's a legal requirement if you are accepting EU customers.
There are a lot of things to do outdoors around Maryland: there are a lot really good MTB (or just hiking) places, like Rockburn and Patapsco State Park; beaches are within two hours away; ski / snowboarding places within two hours away; and then there's the Chesapeake Bay.

It's not California, but it's nothing either.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you might still need a consent box even if you use Plausible.

I've only skimmed over the docs, but it looks like they derive a unique identifier from the IP address and user agent which changes every day. IP addresses still count as Personally Identifiable Information under GDPR, so deriving an identifier from this for a use case such as analytics would likely require consent. This is speculation though so I'd be interested to hear what others think.

If it is critical to the operation of the website (functionality like storing saved items in a shopping cart, or security), then you wouldn't need consent.

In reality though, Plausible looks great and using it is a huge improvement over Google Analytics for privacy.
> I'm just a little uncomfortable with a feature that uses diffs for purposes other than display for humans, since they don't seem to be consistently defined.

Sure, I see your point as it applies to cherry-picks/rebasing. Yes, there's no formal guarantee it will do as you expect. The user should always check it manually. Occasionally it doesn't do what you want.

I'm of the opinion git cherry-pick should default to behaving like git cherry-pick --no-commit for that reason.

edit:

> they don't always produce the most sensible result

I don't know how much work has been done on language-aware diff/merge algorithms, but I can't see an obvious reason for it to be a dead-end.
> around the ability of a government to enforce the rule of law in its own territory

Nitpick: "rule of law" doesn't mean "having laws" or "enforcing laws," it means everyone being subject to the same set of laws, including elites and the government itself.

Some countries without the rule of law, like the PRC, like to go on and on about the "rule of law" but mean something less:

https://www.justsecurity.org/58544/china-rule-law-cautionary...:

> Despite the Party’s current encouragement of “rule of law” and its celebration of the Constitution, Chinese rule of law—officially called “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics”—differs fundamentally from rule of law as internationally understood. To begin with, all aspiring Chinese lawyers—at least according to the study material for one bar exam preparation course—must commit to the belief that law is subject to the “leadership of the Party.” The same bar review material further states that the fundamental principle of Chinese rule of law is to “maintain the rule of the Party.” Meanwhile, a recent bar exam question affirmed that “Western Capitalist Rule of Law Thought” is not an “origin” of Chinese rule of law. Accordingly, rather than promote basic principles such as the supremacy of law, legal accountability, judicial independence, and fair treatment before the law, fazhi is instead used as a rhetorical tool to legitimize the Party’s rule. It is the Party’s will restated in seemingly neutral and distinctly legal language, which draws on a long imperial tradition of legal discourse while rejecting norms of transparency and impartiality. By evoking fazhi, the Party seeks to attain greater credibility, and in turn inspire greater compliance, by drawing on both the high prestige accorded to rule of law and the Chinese tradition of obedience to edicts of the ruler and the precedents of the dynasty (qianli 前例).
Link to biorxiv version: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.03.931923v1

Summary because the title overstates significance a bit (of a cool paper): Most sequencing today is done using Illumina machines, which basically break DNA into small parts (on the order of ~hundred letters/bases), then use fluorescence/imaging to find sequence.

This paper applies to a new technology, nanopore-based sequencing, which pulls much longer pieces of DNA (record length: 2.3 million base pairs, but most end up shorter, on the order of thousands of bases) through a microscopic molecular channel, providing real-time outputs of voltage that can be somewhat noisily mapped to nucleotide sequences (since different DNA sequences have different voltage outputs when run through a channel).

This technology is very cool, and the fact that it's real-time opens up an interesting idea: you can potentially give real-time feedback to the sequencer as the run is operating about whether a given piece of DNA it's reading is interesting to you. If it's not, the channel can spit out the piece of DNA and start reading in a new one.

So for example, let's say you want to sequence viral sequences present in a human tissue sample. Well, naively, if you just try to collect all the DNA in the sample, most of the DNA is going to be from the human genome (human genome is ~100,000x bigger than viral genomes and likely not all cells are infected). This approach aims to map the DNA as it's being read to some reference (in this case, the human genome) and avoid re-sequencing pieces of DNA mapping to the reference (by getting the channel to spit out the piece of DNA it's reading and wait for a new sequence to come in). Your sequencing results are therefore enriched in the actual sequences of interest.

In terms of the contributions of this paper, nanopore sequencing is still a growing area. This real-time aspect has been a key motivation for some time: this paper improves the feasibility of the approach by algorithmic improvements to mapping between real-time voltage readings and reference sequences. This has to be fast to be effective, since DNA is read pretty quickly and in parallel across many channels, and previous methods apparently weren't fast enough to provide real advantages.

The caveats are that this only applies to cases where you don't want to read the majority of DNA present (an important use case but not universal), nanopore sequencing still has issues with high error rates which makes it a bit less attractive than Illumina sequencing, and the amount of DNA you can read through nanopore is still less than what you can do with Illumina. So it's a cool step on the way to a future where we can do some really exciting "interactive" real-time sequencing work but it's still a part of a developing technology suite.
But just in case you need monitor for someone ;) check Dell P2214Hb - it is quality IPS, fast and flicker free! A lot of off lease units for $70.
Cool work! It would be even better if there were some more examples on the page though - the one visible looks very impressive, but it's hard to get an idea of general performance, and many viewers may not have old photos to hand or be willing to upload them to see it in action.
> You convert your dollars to USDT/WBTC/Ethereum at Coinbase, transfer to your wallet, then do 99% of trading/gambling on Uniswap. That's not a future where Coinbase is very valuable.

But then Coinbase would just charge high fees for doing so and draw those down over time if/when competitors enter the market.

Most "regular people" are going to use trusted and established brands and companies. They don't want to see their money go poof.
Thank you!

Unfortunately, I don't have numbers for this. The patchset itself contains some changes to `perf_events`, as well as a few other subsystems. I also saw some summaries documenting performance improvements in the mid-single-digit range (3-5%), but I'm not aware of anything in-vivo. The kernel mailing list for this patch range[1] might be a good reference.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1547073843.git.jpoimboe@r...
Parent commenter says:

> I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it

You don't need tracking cookies to track simple metrics like pageview numbers.
It's an option to note, I haven't used them as I'm not sure I'd have a good chance of being able to get what I want (since obviously there has to be a seller for me to buy), and the fees also seem pretty notable (5%, and/or up to 2% annual), maybe with some other potential issues of distribution/ownership (it seems it's not equivalent to owning the shares, but owning part of another entity that does own the shares). But, it may be a lot nicer than nothing for some, so thanks for reminding me of it.
Thanks for the heads up!! We will fix this ASAP.
>WA doesn't have a periodic safety inspection, so a tire check program would be a totally new thing.

Ok, wow, that's so unexpected. In Germany we have mandatory safety and emissions inspections every two years.

That also explains why there were so many parts of tires on roads in WA, last time I was there.

>Maybe, you could do a rebate program to encourage people in the area to update a little sooner.

That would probably get us 80% of the way there, especially if you tell people why they should switch.
How Home Depot Beats Lowes In a more powerful digital experience
In a Big Year for Video Games, These Players Are Shifting the Culture
Russia is getting one heck of bang for its buck. Its a declining regional power with a GDP the size of Texas [1,2] who our media blames all of our problems on. Imagine if a comparable adversary decided to mess with the United States.

[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Russia/Uni...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
To be fair, most of them probably do. It's not like the introduction of GDPR in Europe 2 years ago suddenly made all of the shit a marketing dept shoves into Google Tag Manager completely legit and above board.

These third parties will take what you give them and _also_ take what they can get from your browser if you're embedding their script. Are you going to proxy those scripts as well to stop them getting the user's IP address and then geolocating it to grab even more info?

The cookie warning banner is bullshit only in the sense that it achieves nothing. Accept it or deny it, it won't change a thing. Same with the tracking consent popups: despite the law saying they should be opt-in by default, they're still treated as opt-out by default, meaning that all of these sites _still_ collect your data because you're blacklisting individual sites from tracking, as opposed to whitelisting them. You need to set a cookie to say that you don't want tracking and not thousands of cookies to say you do want it?

That's being tracked... it's all wrong. Literally everything you offer as information, or don't offer, is another node in their graph.
> As much as I love Docker for development, going all-in on containers for prod was a huge mistake.

Containers are a great deployment mechanism for production. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to think that they are a substitute for package management. This was obviously (and I do mean very clearly obvious in advance from first principles¹, no hindsight needed) going to become a disaster. Most people just do not care - they are either completely unaware of the problem, or they know that in a few years' time they will either have changed jobs or be promoted (in no small part thanks to their "Docker thought leadership") and it will no longer be their problem (and they would still get to claim "Docker thought leadership" success on their résumés).

¹ Also from experience - VMware came out with "virtual appliances" in the mid-2000s that promised to do a lot of what Docker would later be used for.
Microsoft/GitHub as businesses incorporated in the United States are bound by the law of the United States. I am not sure of what you are insinuating here.
Half of all methane emitted from termites is broken down by bacteria within the termite mounds and underlying soil before it enters the atmosphere. ... A group of bacteria called methanotrophs live in the soil and consume methane as their primary source of energy.[..]

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-a-termite-s-moun...
Collab X the Climate Crisis
https://whimsical.com/ :)
The US with its strong world currency has no use for bitcoin, in fact it is an enemy of the dollar-based economy. For the rest of the world , the bitcoin economy may become a weapon to dethrone the dollar, and with it a large part of the US influence.

Not sure if FOMO, but central government abuses seem to have found yet another competitor.
Google should close the "ethics" department and open another one dealing with etiquette. It seems we've lost our manners and need someone to help us find them again.

So sorry to see you go, "ethics", but we're just not ready for you yet. Perhaps someday when we're more evolved!8-))
Should the long read lengths allow error correction to work well if there is sufficient coverage?
I would say Coinbase is making money hand-over-fist with retail. The basis points they charge are enormous compared to stock exchanges. Crypto is low-volume compared to traditional equity markets but very high-fee.
More States File Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google [pdf]
But why? What is the connection?
"There is no greater evil than a movie pirate, who steals food from the mouths of hardworking film crew members and their children, in order to avoid paying the fifteen bucks or whatever it is now to see a movie during its theatrical run, or waiting a bit to pay an even smaller amount to see it on DVD or streaming. Therefore, you can't give a pirate an inch of quarter, lest they consign the entire glorious film industry to the dustbin of history."

There are far greater evils.

1. You have to define who you mean as pirates. People at home recording on VCR a TV show are not in fact stealing food from anyone, you have no proof of this because the underlying factors for why this kind of piracy happens results in there being little to no loss of revenue.

2. The overwhelming majority of pirates do not have access to the digital product because they cannot pay for it. Therefore there is little to no loss in revenue.

3. Equating digital goods to physical good theft is an outright lie. Digital goods are infinitely copyable without cost.

4. Anti-piracy is a business not because it works but because film makers want to believe it does. It's snake oil that those who don't understand the digital world continually fall into.

5. "Anti-piracy" is an act used to suppress Fair Use of content so people cannot transform it. Especially for criticism.

6. Actual commercial pirates should be prosecuted. But if you lump all kinds of pirates together then you don't have the legal resources to target the actual harm.

7. Piracy is not as evil as you want to cast it. Piracy only looks evil if you're creating products people can't pay for. If people are overwhelmingly pirating your content even when it's affordable, accessible and good then your product isn't actually affordable, accessible, nor good.

8. People pay for quality. As you can see time and again movies originally on VCR have been resold on DVD and blue ray dozens over. Many people have both VCR recordings and retail DVD's. That goes against the spirit of what you're saying.
>20/80 is worse than other retail brokerages (virtually all of which do PFOF, because none of them are especially competent at actually executing trades) --- even if you factor in the lack of trading fees,

(1) I don't think you can make a blanket statement about the split and trading fees. If I bought 1 stock for $100 this year I'm better off with the 20/80 split than a trade commission. Conversely, if I bought 10,000 shares @ $100 I would be better off paying a commission and getting a 80/20 split.

It's also not clear what's better for the consumer. If I'm paying a commission then I have to trade sub-optimally in order to batch trades. Maybe I'm better off being able to make a trade for free when I need it even if it costs me more in fees.

(2) This seems like an odd standard. I can take 20% as a rebate because everyone else does, but I can't take 80% because no one else does that. So maybe I can take 25% or maybe 30% or maybe 35% and that's ok. Where exactly is the line?

And if someone launches a competitor called Jesse James and they take 80% does that mean Robinhood is now ok? Or is two not enough? And if two is not enough then how many does it take?
All cause mortality is absurdly higher if you use drugs to sleep, including OTC stuff[0]. So, probably not. Almost certainly same story with other "meds" that dipshits pop like popcorn[1].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4883191/

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/news/medication/widely-used-class-drugs-l...
This is an entirely reasonable stance. A given product could have n(bignum) sellers. A review telling me that a seller is doing shady things tells me nothing about the product. Amazon told him to go review the seller in the appropriate section. What's the problem?
The EU would just enact a covid tax for anyone infected
The bill is well meaning precisely because it exposes a systemic problem not just with UX but with a ton of other aspects of the web. It's a bit like having your kitchen smeared in rat shit. There is a moment of annoyance when you realize that, but it's the first step towards being able to clean it up. It's not so much negative consequences as a problem that was there to begin with whether we noticed it or not. It's subjectively negative in the moment, but to ignore it would have been far more of a problem.
It was controversial at the time, and required shaming ("cancelling") companies that didn't boycott South Africa.

Similar tactics against Israel resulted in laws against boycotts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Anti-Boycott_Act
Has there been any evidence presented to support the attribution to Russia?
I'd say artificial light might have had the same effect internet has on us. Prior to it, we had to follow nature's cycle, then we made our own schedule. Internet allows to choose ad infinitum .. we're unregulated by the slow capped technologies of the past, the burden is on us to stop.
Indeed. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics) say he used it in 1932, and says the idea is even older (“leak through” in 1896; “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” in the 1890s)
Thought I should note this is in addition to the suit over ads yesterday.
Keycloak is great software, and I am thankful to Redhat for keeping it open source and maintaining it. But I do not believe that a production deployment of keycloak with HA, backups, customization, integrations, upgrades etc. is easy at all. It takes time and planning to get it right. Depending on the constraints, it isn't obvious to me why it would win by default over SaaS alternatives, or simpler on-premises alternatives like OP's.
The designer talks about it in this video https://youtu.be/WJL00d1JB4Y?t=70
> "Why reveal any details about the work being done?"

So we're talking about it instead of watching what they're actually doing. The Dr. in this story seems like a made up persona to my untrained eye. Maybe a real person, but not sure about what else. Maybe even a useful idiot (term, not derogatory toward Dr. Pais) who thinks they are patenting things, causing the Drive and others to chase down all these meaningless stories and dead ends to keep everyone busy.
The real game changer is just simply trying out VR before forming a really strong opinion. A lot more people are making big assumptions on HN then I would have expected.

If only Facebook didn't start their Facebook login requirement so soon. More people would actually try it out since the cost would be low enough
Somehow the rest of the internet was sold to the idea of "EU is forcing you to put cookie banners, these are nothing but annoyance" rhetoric. Whoever pulled that off, bravo!

In reality, the idea was to make people aware that they are being tracked across the web and and give them options and somehow everyone pretended that "No tracking, no banners" is not an option.

I am so glad that GitHub is coming forward and point out the elephant in the room: You don't need cookie banners or tracking consent forms if there's nothing to consent.
Usually broccoli (tossed in a small amount of oil, garlic powder, and pepper). Another amazing choice is fries. Without the additional soaked oil, the calories is surprisingly close to just eating a baked potato.
Scalping disappears if supply matched demand (with perfect geographic efficiency). Buying from a scalper is strictly riskier than buying from a retailer (might not be able to return faulty equipment, etc). There might be exceptions for rare / limited edition items because then scalpers can potentially control the whole market and extract monopolistic profits (assuming the demand curve allows it).

Scalpers only exist when the true market price of something doesn't match the list price (Demand >> Supply). Graphics cards worldwide, microphones, at-home lifting equipment, USD in Venezuela... it's basically Uber's surge pricing but for products :)
Is anyone else expecting an eventual leak that one of the US cyber security agencies is behind this backdoor, never expecting someone else to abuse it? Too much of what the company has said in the past just echoes intel agencies opinions, and the response seems hyper focused on the "enemy" rather than those responsible for the breach. Their "solution" is just to turn off machines with SolarWinds, something they know will be a huge problem for anyone impacted.
> I don’t think you could code at a high level if you were actually smoking weed every day

Ah, but on the contrary, I can confirm, based on what I consider a “high level” of coding, that some people cannot code without smoking weed every day. I can also assure you that many, many devs are daily users, quality of code output not withstanding.
AFAICT, all current Pi models are assembled in Wales, UK, at a Sony manufacturing plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56B0P5WdAGQ

The parts, of course, come from various places.