skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this slightly differently, but I think it's the same mechanism. I wrote a fairly popular comment on it in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306700

Mass markets drive down median quality through price competition, while quality products move upmarket due to loss of scale. Instead of decent quality for a decent price, you end up with abundant dirt-cheap crap, and a few high-end boutiques, if they're even in your area / available for you to order from.

The text of my old comment:

The hollowing out of the middle ground seems to happen in most commoditized markets.

Take meat. Used to be you'd go to the butcher for your meat, and you'd get a reasonably good product, from a butcher who knew where the meat came from, probably even the farmer who reared the meat. That was the way almost everybody got their meat, so the fixed overheads of having a butcher shop was spread over a large customer base.

Move along a couple of decades. Supermarkets, with their more efficient logistics, eat into the meat trade. Butcher shops almost completely disappear. But supermarket meat goes through a longer supply chain with larger suppliers that have the efficiencies of scale to cope with the pricing power supermarkets have. The butcher shops that survive turn into boutiques, where their unique selling proposition is what used to be commonplace: that they know where the meat is coming from and probably know the farmer that reared it.

The market bifurcates into two basic strategies, low price and high quality (see also Porter's Cost Leadership and Differentiation).

The consumer who's willing to pay a little bit more for a little bit more quality ends up having to pay a lot more rather than a little bit more, because the pool of people who could spread the fixed costs of the higher quality is split - most go for the lowest priced product. There's a ratchet effect, where slightly higher quality products are, at the margin, increasingly expensive because there's no scale in that strategy: the more expensive they become the less uptake they get, which means they have less scale, which means they become more expensive.

In some ways it's a collective action problem: what would be a better outcome for a large group of people can't really occur because individual actions can't sustain a stable state change. In other ways - many, if not most economists believe this - it's a better outcome overall, because more people get to use the bargain basement product.

But I think people in the middle are usually worse off in commoditized markets.
In a way it does bother me. To be honest, it’s often lost on me. I get caught up in the day to day aspects of work, and only when things like this pop up do I really think about the societal implications. But I do truly care about these larger societal issues that my industry and company are at the center of. I’m not a decision maker on what gets deplatformed and what doesn’t of course, but since I care, I guess I am glad to be here where I can potentially influence things in a good direction.
Yes, it's absolutely true that you must be very careful, and of course it's not 100% but it's 99.9999...% perfect.

That said, a VPN logging everything, or Tor being compromised, or the VPS being a honeypot wouldn't be enough to compromise you, you'd need all of them to be true simultaneously.
The problem is downvotes allow for people to affect the environment with very limited effort, so there's selection bias that gives you that view point that better comments are at the top. Likewise, those comments at the top arguably would already be at the top simply with the upvote mechanism - the "lower quality" comments would be at the bottom anyway, no?
Counterpoint: comments that are counterfactual or fallacious deserve to be downvoted. "Not adding value to the discussion" is far too broad, since it includes many other things that can be extremely subjective, so I think it's not useful as a guideline.

> penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes

Seems like a version of automatic meta-moderation. I'm not strictly against the idea of modifying someone's "voting power" based on past voting behavior - frequent vs. infrequent, positive vs. negative, conformist (for lack of a better term) or contrary. However, such systems have to contend with the issue of reinforcing groupthink rather than actual quality, and the last thing HN needs is more groupthink. Also, any implementation is likely to involve the manipulation of values that aren't small integers, and apparently that's Too Hard.
There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google gives away a shitty form of your service for free because the costs are a rounding error to them, people will feel like the service has no value.

I don't know that I have seen a solution I like for this. Perhaps a new anti-monopoly law that prevents orgs from entering into competition without any potential for profit? At the end of the day, maybe the world as a whole doesn't care that they are missing out on small cool tech companies that will never get huge? But, of course, in an environment where small cool tech is unsustainable we'll never know if they would eventually get huge.
I've been on macOS for years now, but was installing Dropbox on a Windows machine. It kept downloading that client instead of the folder sync app.

Took me a while to figure out why.. the Windows Install / Store interstitial is doing them no favors, and their documentation barely even addresses the "Install anyway" link you need to click on.
> I still get these “does not work (EOM)” (effectively) issues

Over the last 20 years, I have received more than my fair share of bug reports just like this from well paid, trained, educated, internal engineers who's entire purpose is to support our software product.

When I complain to management, I get "does not play well with others" type comments.
Change your employer, take a break if financially possible.
Life can be better, please talk to someone. Your loved ones and a professional.

Life can be fun and working more does not solve problems!
> Currently HN is very progressive, although there is a lot of people with conservative views, who simply don't comment.

Currently, HN has a robust (though definitely skewed in ways one would expect of a forum dominated by people who are, if not always currently well-off, in possession of excellent economic prospects in first-world economies) mix of views, though the meme about conservatives being suppressed in tech is well-represented among HN’s conservatives, so we see lots of HN conservatives commenting about how HN conservatives don't comment.

Also, we see lots of them commenting about other things, too.

(In fact, others have argued—though I think this is also, but only equally, wrong—that the dominant viewpoint on HN is right-libertarian.)
For me it was the combination of two factors:
- my girlfriend leaving me
- starting a company with my friends

This led to a massive addition to work. While I don't regret starting a company at all, my sleep quality definitely suffered.
Very difficult to read, but fascinating.
> But either way you lose a lot of the benefits that being officially in the Debian repos would bring.

The first thing I do when I hear about a new (to me) piece of software is an "apt-cache search $SOFTWARE". If it doesn't show up there, that's a red flag to me: this software isn't mature or stable enough to be trusted on my production machines.

Sure, I might go ahead and download it to play around with on my development machines, but for all the "I'm making it awesome!" arguments of developers, more often than not it's just an excuse for lack of discipline in development process.
That last part with the small farmhouse in the middle of nowhere comes across like something out of close encounters. Very cool.
Drawbridge: Documenting a bit something that is undocumented [pdf]
Oh sure, for donations that's a lot. A good rule of thumb is asking for donations returns 1-10% compared to selling software for a fixed price. So the game perhaps could have brought $70-700k. Highly dependent on the type of software industry though.
You'd need quite a long list of companies to work together at the social network level for that to be true.

If you go lower in the stack, like ISP's it becomes much easier.
The next to last was the most interesting to me... it's gotta be an old April Fools in the NSA Technical Journal. It flatly states we've received signals from outer space, and posits a decoding of them....

https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla...
The phrase “a solution in search of a problem” really reminds me of block chain. It's a really cool piece of tech, that so far has mostly enabled speculative investing and anonymous drug trade.
If an upstream dev isn’t supporting software anymore maybe the users should stop using it?
I agree, Countries were even reluctant disclose whether MH370 was registered on their military radar in order to not reveal their capabilities.
> Does someone understand the graph btw ?

Yes. A market with decent products for a fair price bifurcates into mass-market crap and high-end boutiques. See my other comment - I think it's a correct observation.
With all due respect, it seems many are overthinking this. So concerned with winning the conversation that it becomes a contest. Perhaps this upvote/downvote feature is getting to be more of a distraction. Why not just enjoy being part of a conversation and listen. It doesn't have to be about promoting your agenda.
Wow, that feels relatable. Glad your family is doing better now!
I use a pfSense+UniFi combo. I know about the scandal, but they added an option for the user to control it and as far as I know, they haven't done anything questionable since - software quality aside.

(Actually I know the internet loves to bitch about Ubiquiti but my experience has been just fine. Maybe it's because I don't have a Unifi router.)
In order to comply with regulations.

Its pure bureaucracy at work.

You can still infer some info from the context or meta to build some kind of picture.
You don't need to care about possible games, but game states, what's the best result and the move to achieve it in each. Another user computed an upper bound at 8.7E+45 positions: https://github.com/lechmazur/ChessCounter . I pointed out that our planet has about 1E+50 atoms. And we can further compress the database by perhaps two orders of magnitude if we don't store symmetric positions or positions close to mate. A Kardashev 2 civilization could play perfect chess.
Stab has an English cognate in "staff", same meaning you wrote.
Hey don't expect help here, I barely speak my native language correctly let alone English :)

I play it by ear and there's a high chance the "leaning into" expression was used incorrectly. I meant to say, the board was more inclined to follow a roadmap than other options.
John Matze Says He’s Getting Death Threats
Work makes a great distraction for someone who is very unhappy with their family life, has a lot of emotional suffering, or when someone feels entirely powerless over their life circumstances. The more you work the more you feel in control, and/or the more you distract yourself from your feelings. The pay and job duties don't matter so much, I know someone who is a workaholic on low paid low skill job.

If you don't have those personal issues, then yeah, you'd find it hard to relate to.
As I think about it more, I'm really kind of astounded this is being made as an accusation about Huawei specifically being nefarious.
We're stuck on the hourly rate.

The idea of saying "work only 3 or 4 days a week" invites the immediate fear "but how will I survive on less pay"

Try on for size: "work only 4 days. we're not cutting your pay"
Overcoming a false sense of security when using Flow types
I don't know the specifics, but if the extra work meant more money, that might've been a good way help the situation by ensuring there was more money to address the medical costs or allow more availability for your wife to attend to your daughter.
I asked the gastroenterologist at my last procedure. He said some people find it painful when the doctor moves the camera around. My overall impression was that it's more for the doctor's convenience than the patient's; the doctor wants to work fast and efficiently without having to deal with the patient's immediate comfort.
Java 11D™ It goes to eleven!
I can sort of understand people who own their own businesses or otherwise have jobs where the amount they put in is directly related to how much they get back putting in tons of hours and basically centering their life around their work, but I can't quite figure out regular salaried employee workaholics.
> "100 USD fee is essentially a no-go."

I simply fail to understand why people are so privileged to think $100 is no-go. Its not one time fee. Its yearly fee. and $100 is probably half of 1 month salary in many Asian countries.

> "Distributing an OSS app requires neither a domain name nor an SSL certificate"

One can just release app on homebrew or even github release and guess what they don't need domain name or certs. Yes github/homebrew paid that cost but OSS dev doesn't have to pay that much cost to release the opensource app.
If its a 30 day suspension, and they give notice to terminate at the same time, its both?
I think that’s number of people per fitness cohort, the distribution matches the text. Is there empirical data to support it? I kind of doubt there is a second peak instead of the long tail.
Usually they don't want any 11%, they want a specific 11% (or whatever) because they are cutting specific programs.

For example, when I was part of a layoff in 2001, the company mostly let go of engineers and IT (and kept all the sales and marketing), but it wasn't just any engineers, it was the engineers working on a specific product that was being cut.

Also, for IT, my boss came to the three of us and said, "I have to cut one of you, but you're all equally good, so you guys can decide amongst yourself if you want". So at least down at the lower level they did as you suggest.
Management rule of thumb: For every % you cut from the bottom, you lose from the top. Cut 10% of workforce, and 10% of your best people say "yes" to the next headhunter trying to poach them.
First disqualification, than discreditation and last liquidation. Straight from bolsheviks playbook.
See chapter eleven.
If this were the issue you'd think there would already be a series of lawsuits against the free software drivers currently available.
Perhaps replace the time worked with time spent looking for another job. Despite having faced suicidal depression a time or two myself, I have no great advice to offer; but one of the things I've turned to many times is a bit in the ASR FAQ.

5.8) But seriously, should I kill myself?

Seriously, no.
As posted to ASR by Ed Evans:

Ultimate recovery stalks us all, no need to succour it. Quit or
take a leave with or without pay (or permission), stop seeing him
or her, recognise that the cat or dog does rule you, call in sick
and spend the day in the big blue room, it's only money and can
be earned again, all the pictures will be posted again, call the
local professionals if you really feel that way...

And if all else fails? Lawn mowing.

If you're willing to take the severe step of killing yourself, you should
be willing to take less severe steps such as quitting your job or taking a
leave without permission. And really, there _is_ help out there.
Maybe in here, too.

And more of us have been there than you may realize. We're grateful
now that we didn't do it. (Most days.) In chess they have a saying,
"You can't win by resigning." Keep playing; you never know.
Nope, I can't find it on Google. Nada. Even on Wayback. It may have been internal but I definitely remember it. It was pope Benedict.
I’m not sure that would be a solution. And frankly, if we did that, I’m sure the majority of people would want to quickly ban the things they don’t like. And that’s certainly not what I want to do (the deplatforming), so I don’t see it as a solution. I imagine my views are probably in the minority, though we do have a lot of free expression (the concept, not just the amendment) proponents in our industry as well.
First of all, ARM is already dominant on non-laptop mobile. Secondly, ARM is growing rapidly for workloads in places like AWS and many think there will be a lot of growth on-prem as well. Apple's symbolically important for Arm in the sense that it shows switching to a non-x86 architecture for a laptop is possible but they're fairly irrelevant from a volume perspective.

If one assumes that x86 remains the dominant architecture in the industry then, yes, it's basically a zero sum market share game between Intel and AMD. But lots of people don't think that represents reality in the second half of this decade.
For consumers? It’s a race to the bottom. Mom wants to pay $200 if anything. My in-laws do their taxes on their phone.
Milo Yannopolis comes to mind.
At this point the existence of the UFO phenomenon is undeniable. The fact that congress attached to the covid relief bill that the intelligence services must present a report of everything they know about ufos within a 180 days tells you that something is up and they are trying to force the hand of the intelligence service. I also find it interesting that since retiring Harry Read has openly talked about the existence of UFOs.

Congress must force the government agency to immediately release all ufo related info to the public. The public has the right to know.
Something that ties viable competitors to the ability to reject consumers might work.
Just look into crop circles on YouTube. It's plainly obvious to me anyway what is going on here.

But if a person doesn't want to see or believe, it's almost like a magical shield goes over their eyes - they simply won't see it, or won't be able to acknowledge it.
*aholisms are normally so good for your health. Who knew?!
Haha, nope ! As a convenience procedure, and as such exposed to liability risks, and because of the extremely high cost of the lasers, you'll have to pay 2-3000 euros for both eyes (in France, at least). It is in fact cheaper in the US.

However, I'm always surprised by the cost of health in the US. The most surprising thing is that it looks like most Americans seem to not realize that it is perfectly possible to have high quality medicine and well payed doctors if the insurances don't suck all the money between the healthcare system and the patient. Our system has flaws, sure, but the US system looks like crazy to me.
Is this true? That can't be legal.
The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSuite
One reason for this is the artificially limited supply of doctors. The AMA combined with the government keeps the number of doctors down by keeping the number of medical schools and medical residencies low, driving up prices.

Among many other big factors.
CommScope Ruckus?
I have a friend that went to a 4 day week with a paycut, and she seems happy. more space and time away from the burnout to do and not do is always better.
Is there a better platform? I don't think so.
No real market is an easily disprovable claim. While not worth a fortune in the small, in bulk it's worth a imperial butt load. Attention is what you're able to sell. That's advertising and sales. E.g. do you think that those associated with others in right wing militia would be more or less sensitive to advertisements for gear for prepping? How big is that market?
I remember lots of people reporting failures around the time when bad capacitors flooded the market and lots of consumer devices were affected. My WRT54G is a later model (v4.0?) that seemed to be unaffected by this issue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
this article reads like a bunch of personal anecdotes and off-the-cuff theorizing about subjects for which the writer doesn't really have any formal background, trying to hide behind the writer's good writing skills (indeed, this person's about page is that they run a writing course and it looks like they write about just about everything: "My essays cross between topics like travel, culture, media, marketing, and technology. ").

We all have lots of off the cuff theories, anecdotes, and impressions of the world around us, that's great! I've got plenty. But I certainly wouldn't hoist them on everyone with blog posts, as though average informal musings about a random subject are adding some above-and-beyond value to the subject.
Not a huge update, but refc codegen is interesting: dependency on scheme runtime is no longer needed.

This makes Idris 2 feature-equivalent to Idris 1 I guess.
Everyone is at risk.
It's like when someone tells you your singing is bad, so you purposely ham it up for laughs. That's leaning into it.
> Unless you're hoarding data or want to avoid Microsoft

...or have access to a licensed copy of the "real" Microsoft Office, the desktop app, which doesn't lag (that much), where all keyboard shortcuts work, drag-and-drop isn't too surprising, and you can use over a slow/metered/non-existent connection (bus, train, airplane), so you don't really care about Office 365.

Or you use it for something other than Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I know plenty of people who do architecture, landscaping or design who use Dropbox precisely because most of the things they use it for don't involve Office (much).

For lots of people, Microsoft 365 Personal is 70 $/year for 1 TB and a bunch of things that might as well be Google Docs, which are free. 200$/year for three times more storage space isn't a terribly bad deal.

Edit: yes, I realize Microsoft 365 allows you to use the desktop apps. That doesn't add much if you already have the desktop apps. Or if you don't need either the web or the desktop version.
Here I think of it as “committing to the direction,” the way you “lean into” a tight turn on a bike or motorcycle. It’s similar to “doubling down” or other euphemisms for committing harder to a course of action.

The metaphor works for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apple had no problem recording Siri conversations until The Guardian called them out on it.
And even if you don't know anyone using Signal, I still recommend to setup an account. Maybe someone you know is already on it and you didn't know?
I always wondered if it is feasible to do a pipelined/super scalar stack based CPU.
That's true, but their ASP declined over time, and continues to do so just like everyone else's. You may pay marginally more comparatively, but their relative advantage has never improved over time.
Then you have to deal with a linux UI, which is a complete blocker for me.
Also in my experience:

Workaholism is also not seldomly caused by mental (and sometimes physical) health problem where the affected person
tries to escape reality (their past, their mind, their life etc.).
>I suspect Amazon is not the one to breach the lease.

Yes, that was my point
Why do you think it is an April Fools prank?
I think it's a little more nuanced. Parler had some users who broke Parler's own TOS, and Parler was slow to react (problems of scale? victim of own success? Willfully slow to enforce? We don't know). Amazon acted swiftly, in light of a loosely connected civil disturbance (although Amazon's actions were not expressly a result of the riot, the timing is relevant).