skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone familiar with Inverted Text Indexes when AltaVista was at its peak appreciated DEC's business model and execution. Google's PageRank pulled the rug out from under standard Inverted Text Indexes and quickly obsoleted the competition. Re-ordering the entire index nightly with potentially multiple passes is non-trivial and requires throwing a lot of hardware at the problem.

In my opinion, marketing wasn't the problem; the problem was fast-following a disruptive technology without understanding how it worked. Once details of PageRank were published it was too late.
Yeah, I've never understood this part of Joel's analysis.

Sun were a hardware specialist. They wanted commoditised software, i.e. fungible, cheaply available everywhere in the same form, so that it is not a differentiator, as it is not an area of differentiation that they believed they'd win on, unlike hardware.

Further, they had a reasonable fear that software would more and more be made to run in only one place - Windows - which would lock them out of large parts of the market (like a car company whose cars ran on a fuel available in only a small number of remote locations).

So, they did their best to commoditise software with write-once run-anywhere. It fits perfectly with the strategy Joel outlines. Now all the software vendors are directly competing, as they can't use hardware tie-ins, and producing more software (write once), and all this should drive down software prices, and thereby leave more money on the table for superior hardware, which will become (they hoped) the key competitive advantage in the market-place.

Clearly, they lost anyway. As far as I can tell, that was because they lost on their strength: the market wanted commodity hardware (ever improving with Moores law, anyway) for vast data centres, rather than more capable and expensive hardware.

Yeah, if they could have built amazing software, like hardware producing Apple with their popular consumer OS and other software products, then they could maybe have won, but then if they couldn't win on hardware, their strength, why should anyone expect them to win on software?

(Okay, Java alone proves they had serious software chops, and I hear much of their software was good, but clearly they didn't think they could compete with the entire Microsoft ecosystem of software (and then there is Linux, FreeBSD, et cetera...), and I tend to agree).

Basically, they bet on hardware in an age of software. This wasn't a failure to commoditise their complement, but a failure to choose (to the extent they had a choice...) the right side of a complement divide.
Apple still has search ads: https://searchads.apple.com/

From the first of those listings: “Today, our technology and services power advertising in Search Ads in the App Store and Apple News.”

This meets one of the criteria you specified (“They also have their own ad platform […]”), but not the other (“[…] that will benefit from this”).
There's zero chance that gets enforced.
There's a lot of NYT and liberal fans that will defend the paper against any transgression, but I contend the NYT is not a newspaper, but an entertainment organization. They don't retract or change anything unless they absolutely have to, and probably in this case were forced to. There is no journalism anymore, it's all mass entertainment.
> Simple: use mocker.patch to patch out random.randrange

Why not just pass in 'randrange' as a function argument?

def findBias(randrange):
heads = tails = 0
for i in range(n):
if randrange(100) < 100*p:
heads += 1
else:
tails += 1
return heads/tails

import random
bias = findBias(random.randrange)

def myTest():
result = findBias(lambda: generateInSomeWay)
assert checkInSomeWay(result)

It's amazing to me how many complicated and convoluted hacks people can come up with, to avoid calling a function with an argument.
What's with the ridiculous amount of "Smith is an unreliable narrator" narrative all of a sudden? Seems like every time 1984 is mentioned, you get a comment about "Smith and unreliable narrator"?

> Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length

"Mildly torture"? Did we read the same book? The torture in 1984 was as systematic and torturous as possible. Of course it's fiction, but nothing mild about it. Also, death squads are used by regimes that are unstable or fighting for power. Like in afghanistan. The totalitarian state described in 1984 was the opposite of afghanistan - completely secure.

Also, Smith wasn't in the "real world" with a "real regime", it's fiction. I hope you realize that. He is narrating a fictional world. So it's rather absurd to claim that he is an unreliable narrator because he isn't narrating the real world. By that logic, every narration in fiction is unreliable and as a consequence makes the claim about unreliable narration absurd.
Can someone put in plain terms what this actually means for advertisers? I realize this is about protecting privacy, and I fully support that, but putting that aside for a second, I am part owner of a small business and an advertiser - what consequences could this have? I rely on Facebook ads to market to parents in the local area (as well as Google). We use several FB tools to try to make the target audience as specific as possible. This helps, because not everyone is interested in the services our business offers, and saves us ad money. Does this mean that the campaigns I run could become less effective, because FB is less capable of figuring out what the user is like? What will breaks exactly? Is it just retargeting?
Gas tax isn’t a counter example since the earmarks have exceptions that allow the money to be used for arbitrary other purposes, which in practice is the case.
My designs from 2016 to 2020 as a non-designer
FWIW, the man in the article has a genetic form of Alzheimer's that is unavoidable.
That example is like the United States losing all of California, but taking back its Navy base in San Diego.
Yes, and it's extremely unsettling that we have absolutely no idea what causes it or how to treat it. But jumping straight to "There is evidence in mice" with the implication of "try this yourself" is not justifiable.
Owning wealth imposes a burden on the society to the degree that it needs to be protected.
Not to mention Elon Musk, Joe Rogan. I’ve also seen a few high profile YouTuber’s leave recently too. The amount of people fleeing to Idaho from California is causing housing issues there.
Maybe I'll reach that point, but honestly, apart from a couple of asset glitches now and then, I'm loving the game.

The story is solid, the voice acting great, the gameplay is pretty darned good. I don't see what has everyone so upset I guess.
Had they not doubled-down, and instead corrected the allocation error, we wouldn't even be reading about this.

So, I'm not sure that it makes a difference if some people—hearing about their screw-up—are angry for the wrong reason.

To be clear, I'm with you that this probably wasn't a mustache-twirling attempt to divert vaccinations from the frontline staff. But I don't think that it matters much, given the medical expertise we would expect from an organization like this.
Yes. You should go somewhere they do a lot of the particular surgery you are interested in.
thanks for posting this. I love when HN brings together the principal actors and primary sources. OT: I wish we could use webmaster more often, even though thats a much murkier proposition in the days of product managers deploying the new site via CDeployment.
"Caroline huffily replied that regardless was a footless, weak word and got you nowhere, that on the other hand you threw in the word irregardless and won any argument hands down."

Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
Not quite - he paid a wage to labor based on the current competition in the labor market and the cost of a worker to provide for his/her necessities. Then he sold the end product of the workers' collective labor for its value, determined by the sum of the value of all the labor that went into producing it. He pocketed the difference between the former and the latter. That's where profit comes from.
The main issue is not that people aren't enjoying the game, but that CDPR outright lied with their marketing videos.
Watched Star Wars 3 yesterday and it's exactly this. I wasn't convinced anyone would ever act like this though, seemed too fake to me (maybe the acting was the issue?).
It's for organisation of information and it's an Emacs "mode".

It's as much "emacs with some configuration tweaks" as VS Code is "chromium, with slightly improved <textarea>".

W.r.t. the good question in a comment that definitely has more than just that, yes, there are partial ports of Org mode to vim, VS Cod{e,ium}, and AFAIK Sublime Text, but Org does make use of some facilities of Emacs that are not as easy to replicate on these editors. For exporting, Pandoc can help to some extent, but it's imperfect and not as configurable.
Something strange was happening in the UK rates in the last few weeks. Despite a second lockdown, cases in London started increasing again, and areas in 'Tier 3' (highest tier restrictions) also started increasing cases post-lockdown. This was despite other areas continuing to drop cases despite having the same measures. Apparently the areas that had started rising were correlated with percentage prevalence of this new strain, which at the moment is known to be present in the UK, but might have come from abroad, or travelled already.

As a result of this, I can see the vaccination programme getting a huge rocket, as it looks like lockdown and highest restrictions aren't decreasing cases - which is potentially disastrous for containing the virus, and stopping the hospitals get overwhelmed at a time when they normally operate at full capacity.

Christmas relaxation rules have been cancelled in the UK, which has caused much disappointment to my family and friends. Understandable, but no less disappointing.
> Maybe a percentage will, but I think when people are trying to guess and assume what these people will do as "rational economic agents", they miss the human factors. No one is going to pick where they go to college based on the taxes on the ultra-rich unless they are obsessed with money. Once rich, are you going to uproot yourself entirely from any family, friends, and connections in the US? You have to consider that rational economic behavior still has to consider what the point of it all is, and money for the sake of money doesn't tend to be the answer even among the hyper-rich.

I think this is probably true once someone has a career and a family, but the college part doesn't pass the sniff test for me. the "just graduated college" group is probably the most mobile slice of the overall population. especially if you chose a college away from your hometown, you are pretty likely to either move back home or pursue a career somewhere else entirely at the end. I think other folks are also more mobile than you give them credit for. unless they currently have children in school, I find people are pretty likely to move if they see an opportunity for a significantly better combo of salary/COL/taxes.
An important tidbit not noted in the opinion piece: AB 2088 died in committee when the CA legislature adjourned in August.
The interesting part of this campaign is that targeted advertising doesn’t even work.

I wonder how Google and Facebook will fare when that becomes common knowledge.
Can we talk about the AI? Why is the AI so bad? From driving, to police not being able to chase you in cars, to spawning randomly.

Does the game use Lua or a scripting language for the AI? If not, I think that would easily explain the problems, as it seems like so much behavior of the NPCs was never iterated on.
i love to read more about this do you have any sources?
Show HN: Editing photos and videos like a pro with one tap, using deep learning
If all this is true, what's the problem with Apple's change? Won't people opt in to maintain all these benefits?
I found this opinion interesting: https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2015/09/how-call-rooms-reflect-...
Agreed, this is definitely no worse than any other AAA release in recent memory. I wonder if people remember that on its release day, Skyrim's main quest could not be completed due to a bug.

Anyways, I'm 50 hours in and it's awesome.
Such trials are highly unethical IMO. I suspect that this opinion will be shared by most. There is a huge and obvious difference compared to a drug placebo.
It's not so much that they care about the moral impact of their actions, as that society might backlash them if they're not too careful. Large != untouchable.

I wish I'd thought of a better word to use than "morally," though, since it didn't quite capture what I meant to say. I meant, people being upset about their actions is hard to quantify.
It might not affect a lot of people and it won’t make a dent for the high net worth folks, but on principle, I oppose it.

A better option for California would be to make it a tax free haven. And institute a flat consumption tax.
There is a mix in the area that have helped create your biome.

Now go into an area with decomposing bodies. The additional bacteria load will overwhelm most.

It's a little more complex qnd the way you explain it is how I would introduce the topic to my child. You may have billions of bacteria but if you introduce billions of different types you may not have the bacteriophages to deal with those types and your body may produce these as a defense (or not if your immune system is weak) but what happens in many cases your body may kill off beneficial bacteria and that gets replaced with a similiar but non-beneficial bacteria and because the phages changed you can't get back. We see this with fluoroquinolone antibiotics[1]

Davies EV, Winstanley C, Fothergill JL, James CE. The role of temperate bacteriophages in bacterial infection. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2016;363(5):fnw015. doi: 10.1093/femsle/fnw015
> Deterministic builds cannot come soon enough.

This doesn't do anything for people who buy SolarWinds Orion, which is a closed-source off-the-shelf tool that gets picked up everywhere because of a combination of good sales tactics, compliance checkboxes, and ability to remove work from all involved.

Going back up the chain, a technical solution probably won't solve the issues inside SolarWinds either. Systemic organizational issues lead to RCE backdoors and implants distributed on official update servers, signed with authentic keys.
Crazy. Have there been any details revealed yet on how it was transported? Stonehenge is thousands of miles from Michigan
But that has a related cause and effect. The reason these things have happened in California isn't the geography. If you drive a large fraction of the same people out and into places like Austin through excessive housing costs and high taxes, then the next Elon Musk can build it there instead. Because it's the people, not the place.
We really need a way to better tax institutional owners over a certain size that inflate our real-restate market.
No more Invitation Homes moving into a areas buying all the 'entry level' homes jacking rent by 30%+ in months and... rinse repeat.
Owning tens of thousands of properties shouldn't be a thing that is incentivized in a country full of homeless where most people can only dream to ever own a house.
Integrity starts by verifying your sources before publishing things as facts to millions of listeners.
They regulate medical devices, too, so the literal name of the fda doesn't restrict their mandate.
Not even wrong. There's hardly a difference between the latest iPad and the latest MacBook.
From the article,

“There is research suggesting that people who are in better health are more likely to volunteer, but because scientists are very well aware of that, in our studies we statistically control for that,” says Sara Konrath
Can you explain your preference for no-lockdown?
NZ is covid free, the economy is rebounding fast and we have had very few deaths and (relative to others) short lockdowns. Unemployment is considerably less than expected. Christmas is shaping up to be normal.

The results in NZ are only subjective if you pull some elaborate contortions, NZ has done well.
Nope, it was Visual Studio, circa 2012.
I presume it would be opt in, would make for a handy github action tbh
It's an understandable error only if residents and their safety isn't at the front of your mind. Perhaps if a resident had been closely involved they would have been able to tell the developers that they don't have anything in the location field.

It's not like Stanford didn't know a limited supply vaccine was coming several months ago, there was time to figure this stuff out.

And it would have been, if it had been a high enough priority.
Eat Just Makes First-Ever Commercial Sale of Cultured Meat in Singapore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) was a “better AskJeeves” — it routed around the natural-language problem by feeding your question to real people.

Interestingly, it didn’t just boil down to a Quora/StackOverflow model; it wasn’t a “wisdom of crowds” thing. Instead, your question really was used as a search query — but instead of searching a pool of documents, it would search a pool of experts, matching you with an expert who knows about similar things†, then facilitating contact with them (and forwarding them your initial query/question to start off the conversation, like a Helpdesk system.)

† Not sure how they did this part — for academic experts, they could “just” fulltext-index their corpus of published journal papers, to build up a “knowledge fingerprint” of the expert. Not sure what they would do for people in industry without a stream of publications, though.

Sadly, Google bought them, shut down the Aardvark product, and probably just put the engineers on regular SRE code-slinging tasks. It almost seems like Google felt threatened. And — hint hint — nothing’s stopping anyone from building something like this again :)
People who are still alive used to tolerate bans on interracial marriage.

I think there would be a lot more tolerance of language if it didn't have real negative policy and workplace outcomes.

> We used to tolerate being offended

I remember when a pop country band got death threats for saying the Iraq war was a bad idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
The fact you are giving me band camp links only strengthens the point im saying. Rock is on life support at best, if all you have are bandcamp links to indie bands. People arent going to go through everything on bandcamp to possibly find a gem.

I clicked a few of those links they sound like any band from the last 20 years. New rock sounds for 60 years were mainstream music and accessible and progressive. That is no longer the case. Rock is not a major genre any more. Less people are getting into it. Guitar sales have been dropping, its not popular. For a genre to be healthy it needs innovation and new ideas.
If they were ever doing their jobs this never would have seen the light of day. Even the most basic amount of research showed it was unsubstantiated.

Same with 1619 which is “problematic”.

Their desire to push a narrative outweighed their desire to be factually correct.

The scandal here isn’t they removed something quietly. It’s that if they failed their jobs here, where else are they failing and just haven’t been exposed yet? This isn’t the first time they lied to you, it’s just a time they were caught.
Friends are close enough you can tell them the stuff that bothers you and distant enough that they can comment without being directly involved.

This brings so many advantages and one of my favourites is the sense of putting the world to rights. When you have good friends you can calibrate a justified sense of where you're going and what things ought to be without having to commit to learning it the hard way.

Frankly Ford should of had the conversation in the article with a friend, he would likely derive a more satsisfying answer to his premise.

He repeats his own woe too many times and goes on about his over-thinking about friendshop. Just go to a pub and socialize, why does it have to be a reminder of your childhood betrayals, or your crippling loneliness? Everybody has their own story, if you listen for two minutes people say incredibly interesting things.

This guy dumping his life story on page 1 makes a friendship a very short affair. Friends gradually reveal themselves to each other, for a bunch of reasons. But it makes the friendship last a long time and gives you time in the moment to reflect and enjoy the difference each shared story makes on your life.

Do people reject their own instinct for friendship??
The New York Times has thoroughly established their bona fides as an unreliable waste of time. I love it when people tell me they read the times. This saves me time evaluating their skepticism and attachment to reason.
> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.

This is technically true, but doesn't convey well that it was quite clear that N95 masks worked well, and he suggested they didn't work because they were in short supply and he wanted to preserve the ability of medical personnel to use them, not because there wasn't data that they worked. The data that came in were about cloth masks also being largely effective, thereby alleviating worries about a lasting shortage. Before that became apparent, Fauci was forced to choose between an immediate shortage of masks for hospital workers, and long-term credibility if such a situation arises again.
The linked page on Lucet does call out WASI if that make it any better.
It doesn't only regulate food and drugs.
Honestly, I fantasize about a California with population levels pre-Gold-Rush, pre-Dust-Bowl and pre-Silicon-Valley.
You’re linking to an article from mid 2018, before SF passed the largest tax in the city’s history: 2018 Prop C, a gross receipts tax for homeless services expected to raise another $300M. Several other additional tax measures were also passed since then to raise funds for homeless services.
They’re pretty determined, with March being the best rumored rollout so far. Delays are around SKAdNetwork, as the change destroys traditional attribution and alters how ads are run. They gave networks and publishers more time to adapt, but there won’t be any more delays

Antitrust risk could be a factor, as the preferred treatment of ASA seems dubious - but the change seems to be coming regardless
Text-only version of this article: https://text.npr.org/944594193
It’s a complex topic, first homeless is often a temporary condition where people cycle through homelessness. Second only 37% of American homeless population is unsheltered. So, the people who moved a long distance while homeless is a small percentage of the overall population, but also a much harder population to serve.

Anyway, hospitality isn’t really a question of weather as Alaska for example has relatively high rate of homelessness and NYC one of the highest. Mississippi on the other hand has the lowest rate despite mild winters and significant poverty.
I don't think that's true, there are just a scant few publications that actually value real, classic journalism these days.

One example is Reuters. They report facts, stated exactly as things happened, without editorializing and injecting their own opinions on top of every other sentence.

In other words, they let you form your own opinions, instead of giving you theirs. That's called journalistic integrity, and it's the reason they're the only news source I actually pay for.
I haven't played the game but I've seen a lot of their trailers. The original announcement trailer was all about police bringing in a cyborg person who went on a killing spree. Granted, that trailer is most of a decade old now, but their recent marketing is similar. I just saw a commercial saying something like "nothing is illegal in Night City... As long as you don't get caught". Even though it was coolguy marketing fluff, I assumed that the police AI would at least be at the level of 15 year old Grand Theft Autos