skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> R&D Expenses: $727.8M (39%). This is an insanely high number for a company that is not a startup.

Last I just checked they tried to crawl out of their “it’s all about files. Simple!”-niche and become a fully web-based project management, chat, collaboration, office-thingie with links to GSuite and Office365.

As a long-time user it was quite incomprehensible, and definitely nothing I appreciated or felt added value to my Dropbox. On the contrary, I was annoyed by all the product-nagging about these features I didn’t want.

Combine that with them obsoleting long-established features in their desktop sync-software which made them the only universal file-sync solution across all platforms, the reason I chose Dropbox over competing offers.

Do all that, and you lost people like me as a user. I’m on Nextcloud now and not coming back.

I really don’t think they have worked out their survival plan yet. Trying to outcompete MS and Google on their own turf is obviously not a fight they’re going to win.
Yeah, I remember that one and was referring to it as well.

What I mean is, what are the chances of new ones in light of this acquisition? Or is this old one not settled yet and it’s still the same case?
An open source CAD program for creating virtual Lego models
Flexible dumb terminals everywhere. But we already have this with things like google stadia. Fast internet becomes more important. Tricks like vs code remote extensions to do realtime rendering locally but bulk compute (compiling in the case) on the server become more common. I don't think any of this results in radical changes from current technology.
I thought it was about potatoes
And that JIT has additional considerations on Apple silicon, where there is specific hardware that needs to be taken into account: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/port...
I don't know why some topics are flagged while others aren't, but Parler didn't commit any crimes.
I think it's more likely that there were one or more manual steps in generating the graph, and someone just kept going with 2020 instead of typing 2021. The author should explain what went wrong there if this reaches their attention.
> How does one have a similar epiphany with information?

By becoming a paying subscriber. Gated content isn't tweaked for search algorithms and primitive human psychology and therefore always better (if it's not a scam).
Should've listened to this guy all along: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
There's a new version? The only version I've been able to find is an old one that isn't linked anywhere, I had to use a search engine to get at the download page. The only one I still see available right now is for windows.
You're just incorrect to equate Goldwater with Nixon/Reagan, and to draw a straight line from supporting segregation to opposing affirmative action/bussing/etc.

Goldwater offered a libertarian justification for allowing the south to continue segregation. And what did that get him? He flipped five Deep South states, at the expense of losing every traditionally Republican state Nixon had won in 1960, with the exception of Arizona. Goldwater lost stalwart Republican states in the Great Plains and Mountain West, like Colorado, that had voted against FDR three out of four times. Supporting segregation was a political loser for Republicans.

Nixon and Reagan did not "run the same strategy." Neither supported segregation. They didn't have to. Democrats, having abandoned their segregationist wing, sought far-reaching government programs and social engineering to remedy economic and social disparities, as Democrats are wont to do. Nixon and Reagan pushed back on those policies, entirely consistent with Republican ideology.

This article does a good job explaining what really happened: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-myth-of-the-racist-re...

> The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
Rent in Montreal is much lower than Toronto, especially for units over 700 sqft. Toronto apartments can be affordable if you're OK with a 400-500sqft shoebox, but prices rapidly go up from there.
I just bought a proper $250 Zebra scanner for some personal inventory projects / projects that utilize pdf417 and data matrix 2d bar codes and I have to say... this is the absolutely coolest piece of "plug and play" tech I've bought in years! Granted, these scanners largely use machine vision tech but lasers are still used as a form of "dumb" auto focus aid.

On another tangent, I still CANNOT believe that one company at least within the US controls 100% of the issuance of UPC codes. They sell them for up to *$30 A PIECE*! We need a "LetsEncrypt" for UPC codes - granted they serve an important role in load balancing across online stores, preventing counterfeit goods and in Amazon's case... penalizing sellers when they find the same UPC being sold on another online platform at a lower price ;)

Lasers will always be cool
Nitrogen is N2, though. Liquid nitrogen is cheaper than liquid hydrogen.

I was able to find "1 gallon of liquid nitrogen costs just $0.5 in the storage tank". That would be about $0.12 per 1L of N2.
I switched from PIA to Mullvad too for that reason and have absolutely no complaints. Wish I had done them first!
Facial recognition reveals political party in troubling new research
Good one. Survived 2020. But man the music is so loud and abrupt at the start.
I think features are often products for other companies, not for end-users.

E.g., digital displays are a "feature, not a product". End-users get value out of digital displays on their thermostats, microwaves, etc., but no end-user buys a digital display themselves, thermostat and microwave manufactures buy them.

I think the problem with Dropbox is that it's become too easy for product companies to build data syncing themselves.
Flag this trash

https://xkcd.com/1357/
Presumably 80x less power including cooling means more than 80x less power not including cooling.

I'd think that should be enough to get quite a few layers, sure maybe some minimal space between layers for cooling, but radically less than the non-superconducting designs.
If upstream has decided to vendor, I only see two sensible options:

* package the vendored software in Debian, and annotate the category of vendored packages so it's clear to the user they cannot follow the normal Debian policies. I've been bitten by the lack of such feedback wrt Firefox ESR. My frustration would have gone away completely if the package manager told me, "Hey, we don't have the volunteer energy to properly package this complex piece of software and its various dependencies. If you install it, it's your job to deal with any problems arising from the discrepancy between Debian's support period and Mozilla's support period." As it is, Debian's policy advertises a level of stability (or "inertia" as people on this thread seem to refer to it) that isn't supported by the exceptions it makes for what are probably two of the most popular packages-- Chromium and Firefox.

* do not package software that is vendored upstream

I can understand either route, and I'm sure there are reasonable arguments for either side.

What I cannot understand-- and what I find borderline manipulative-- is pretending there's some third option where Debian volunteers roll up their sleeves and spend massive amounts of their limited time/cognitive load manually fudging around with vendored software to get it in a state that matches Debian's general packaging policy. There's already been a story posted about two devs approaching what looked to me like burnout over their failed efforts to package the same piece of vendored software.

Edit: clarification
The Lady with the Megaphone
Nothing, because they can also just read it off of your phone and don't need to 'break' Signal.
I’m less pessimistic. Even if CPUs are 10x faster than they are, that still opens up more opportunities than what can be “absorbed” by less efficient coding/masses. There will always be demands for eking out more of the available processing/compute power and doing so will always be a difficult task. For example, today you can edit large scale videos in real-time and view various movie-quality SFX applied real-time on a consumer desktop. More computing power = more ability to do things cheaply that were in feasible/impossible before. You’re limited by your imagination more than anything.

What’s truly more of a threat is AI-aided programming if that ever becomes a thing. Again, I’m not worried. The gap between telling an AI “do something that makes me $1 billion dollars” and “write a function that has properties x/y/s” or “do this large refactor for me and we’ll work together on any ambiguous cases”, is enormous. So you’ll always have a job - you’ll just be able to do things you couldn’t in the past (it’s questionable whether an AI can be built that generates programs from vague/poorly defined specs from product or even that generates those specs in the first place.

As an obvious counter example to your theory, we have CPUs that are probably 10000x more powerful than in 1980 (actually more if you consider they have processing technologies that didn’t even exist back then like GPUs and SIMD). The software industry is far larger and devs make more individually.

Technically SIMDs and GPUs existed back then but in a much more immature form, being more powerful, cheaper and widespread today than what was available in the 80s.
> markdown note apps sync with Google Drive

Can you recommend the app please?

I migrated away from Evernote when it started to have too much features, and was no longer convenient note taking app.

I'm using Apple Notes now, which is more or less good, but it is vendor-locked, and I plan to move away from iPhone to Android.
I've attended both kinds of credit-granting uni courses, and I agree that watching a recorded video is indeed less involving. But video is also so much easier than a live lecture to stop, rewind, repeat, or play 50% slower/faster that I can't conclude either is clearly superior.

I'd say superiority mostly comes down to the quality of the instruction — clarity, good organization of fundamentals, then broad and deep enumeration of concepts that build meaningfully on those fundamentals. In my experience, few professors value teaching enough to master it. When one does, I'd very much like to be able to attend such a lecture.

Maybe the best of both worlds is to deliberately supplement primary content with outstanding reference material like Kahn Academy or Three Blue One Brown. Being able to drill down on difficult concepts from multiple perspectives is often a great way to resolve obstructions in any kind of teaching method.
Correct.

As I read it, this article is more about the inadequate US healthsystem than anything else, in particular because it forgets to mention that iFOBT is free and automatically sent to all between 50/55-75 in several European countries. No diet required. Return envelop included. Lab results received by postal mail after a few weeks.
Yeah if you're willing to do something completely non-standard of course you can do whatever you want.

> Note that there are also vast differences in performance between different hardware implementations of multiply and divide, with 32-64 cycle latencies not unheard of.

Yes that is exactly the problem.
You're really taking a lot for granted. I think not seeing and understanding that is a reflection of the larger problem you are complaining about.
Is there an idea of entropic potential energy/gradient/pressure? Could you differentiate encrypted data from noise by testing how much energy it requires to flip a bit?
Occasionally on this site I'll see a truly brilliant joke or pun, and I will upvote. But this is not one of those cases. I downvoted this pun train because this is not reddit and I don't want HN to turn into reddit.

Pun trains are so lazy - all you do to join the train is create a low effort sentence out of (in this case) something remotely related to lasers - Light, Amplification, Stimulation, Emission, Radiation, etc. It's not clever, and it spams up the thread enough that you have to collapse the train to see the next interesting comment.
Sounds like a cool project, but I think I'll focus on my Python scrips for now :)
"Oh no, we bricked a lunar computer! Go grab your pressure suit, Mike! Back in a week, darling... Tell your mother I won't be attending her birthday party."
Here's the problem. Say I develop program/library/whatever Foo.

I make a new release every six months, so we have Foo 1, six months later Foo 2, six months after that Foo 3, and so on.

Between the time Foo n and Foo n+1 are released, I'll release minor updates to Foo n to fix bugs, and maybe even add minor features, but I don't make breaking changes.

Foo n+1 can have break changes, and once Foo n+1 is out I stop doing bug fixes on Foo n. My policy is that once Foo n+1 is out, Foo n is frozen. If Foo n has a bug, move to Foo n+1.

A new version of Debian comes out, and includes Foo n which is the current Foo at the time. Debian supports new versions for typically 3 years, and the Debian LTS project typically adds another 2 years of security support on top of that.

That version of Debian is not going to update to Foo n+1, n+2, n+3, etc., as I release them, because they have breaking changes. A key point of Debian stable is that updates don't break it. That means it is going to stay on Foo n all 3 years, and then for the 2 after that when the LTS project is maintaining it.

That means that Debian and later Debian LTS ends up backporting security fixes from Foo n+1 and later to Foo n.
Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this.

To be fair unless you're somehow intune with Europe at that time an average American will not really know how really bad it is (they might have an idea that something bad is happening - but they might described it as mostly targeted attacks to leaders, not knowing about the civilian killings).
You can't (always) afford free software
An Unlikely Database Migration
With the existing volume of .NET Framework applications floating around, many of us find the need to be more precise in the specific framework we are talking about. Our shop still has a few tools that we haven't ported over yet.
Show HN: Txtai 2.0 – AI-powered search engine
Same. Also a bizarre example of someone coming up with a better analogy than I've been able to muster about my own expectations, when in fact they did nothing of the sort.
Yep, that's due to someone calling

strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %G", &tm);

when they should be calling

strftime(buf, buflen, "%b %e, %Y", &tm);
Didn't parler find a host who likes nazis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29
The purpose is not to avoid corruption, it is to have the ability to plausibly deny ts existence by having paper trail of a faux-fair process that was followed.
Interesting thought experiment. Assuming the line is 1/4 mile wide, it would have the same area as a city with a 5 mile diameter, so slightly smaller than SF.

I would like to hear the proposed advantages of the design.
One advantage that comes to mind is that the entire city could run off of a single transportation corridor.
Also a line has the maximum perimeter to surface area. Maybe this is relevant for expansion?
Earn Extra Income: 4 Good Paying Home Based Jobs
Wow, I need some time to process your reply. So much food for thoughts. Thanks for sharing!
Outside of tech, most people don't care about Twitter. If you were to ask a million people what their local Congressperson or Senator said on twitter, 999,999 of them wouldn't know that their legislator had a twitter account or the handle was.

Twitter and Facebook's bans of Trump are only news because Trump relied on them so heavily. They're not the primary means of communication for politicians, nor have they ever been.
There are two things that UKans seem to consistently complain about with respect to NHS: taxes and queues. You don’t have to pay for individual procedures but you have to wait for them because the politicians don’t necessarily take enough of the tax paid in and apply it to care.
It kind of makes sense. People are going to think of 2020 and 2021 as one long year. Maybe 2022, too.
> As Lifehacker put it way back in 2006, it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router, which likely meant it was potentially costing Cisco money to have a device this good on the market.
I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median via RSUs since their stock prices were expected to skyrocket, with little downside, so the RSUs were as good as cash. And why other companies couldn't offer comparable pay. And nowadays it still refers to companies whose publicly trade stock prices continue to grow so much that it makes the stock portion of the compensation very lucrative, which include Microsoft.

>And Netflix's product on the face of it is certainly what we would consider a feature for most big software companies

Netflix's product is the opposite of a feature. A feature is reproducible, which Netflix's media is not, and they are the only place to get it.
> Is it possible that they could in fact produce this data but were prevented from publicly saying so due to a gag order?

Unlikely. Signal and the ACLU were the ones who filed suit to allow them to disclose the terms of the warrant the first place.

It would be an incredibly expensive and risky move for them to do so if they knew that the judge could force them to reveal that they've been turning over more detailed user data in secret.

Not to mention that it would have amounted to perjury.
Update: I completed it, and it is beautifully put together. Hats off to the dev.
Is there a list of useful hardware like this or tplink722 and other similar stories?
I should have clarified that I am not passing judgment on being a workaholic or not. I spent the majority of my working career as a workaholic, although I did try to escape it on a few occasions. The first and only time it worked was when I made it a non-negotiable part of my work to carve out certain lifestyle demands. At the time, it seemed quite likely that this could trigger some negative consequences, and as someone who worked hard on building a career, it wasn't an easy decision to consciously take a few steps back. I only pulled through because of the conviction that it had to happen.

In an alternate universe, I would have stayed a workaholic and would likely retire earlier than I will now. Both are good options IMO. The choices I made have to do with how I want to spend my free time - my favorite hobby requires top physical fitness, and I won't be able to pursue it semi-competitively for many more years.
This gets tricky because there are Unions[0] and works councils in the EU, and they're different. Works councils[1] are usually per company, while unions are not.

Neither maps precisely onto the conventional American definition of a "Union"[*], nor onto the AWU, which is a members-only union. I'm not sure how many Google employees in europe are Unionized, but I know works councils exist in multiple nations.

[*]: My understanding is that a works council is government mandated, and a small group of employees can set one up, they have some formal negotiating power like a NLRA union, but don't represent all employees, and have a limited set of things they can negotiate about (for example they can deal with work conditions, but I don't think they can negotiate pay or strike). EU trade unions are big national organizations, one per industry that do lobbying and counter corporations. Conventional US NLRB unions have a monopoly on negotiations with the company, but require 50%+ membership. Members only unions have no formal legal power beyond non-retaliation, but can still negotiate with a company (about anything).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_Europe

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council
It’s obviously hard to know exactly what Jobs meant, and sadly he is not here to be able to ask him, but here is my best guess as to what he meant:

In the early days of computing people would sell task managers, file managers, memory optimisers, software to burn data to a CD etc. As time went on, these ‘products’ just became features of the operating system. While it used to make sense for people to own a copy of Nero Disk Burner, over time this became expected functionality of the operating system. Consumers demands for base software change over time - Task managers used to be a product you bought for your OS, now they are just a feature of your OS.

So what do Dropbox offer, I would say it is “seamless file syncing”, which meets a broader consumer goal of “my changes are synchronised across my team and devices”. I think the issue is that as time goes on, this is becoming a standard consumer expectation of applications.

Applications like Google Docs and Figma have actually decided that it’s better if they handle the sync rather than Dropbox. Just like windows was better at task management, they are better at synchronising their own files. It means they can even offer things like collaborative editing!

Secondly, as time moves on, the base expectation for an OS might move to ‘all my files are synchronised’ - and if that’s the case, what is the role for Dropbox in a world where customers just expect that as standard? We used to have file managers as their own purchased products and then they became standard OS features. Why should a cloud file manager or sync service be fundamentally different in a cloud-first world? Online sync might be the new windows file explorer. Take iCloud for example - that’s just a feature fully baked into OSX.

So what does this mean for Dropbox? Well what it offers over time might just become what people expect other software or their operating system to do for them - And I think this is what Jobs was predicting. Why do I have to get something else to sync the files on my computer, surely this is an operating system responsibility?

So then the Dropbox space becomes - “cross operating system syncing of files that don’t have a native cloud sync process”. People still buy Nero Disk Burner... it’s just their market isn’t what it used to be.
That price is more than a decade out of date. Helium has been about 10x that the past half decade. I used to pay about $3,000 per 100L dewar a few years ago. Sounds like that price was still common in 2020: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060...

Plus, liquid helium is produced as a byproduct of some natural gas extraction. If you needed volumes beyond that production, which seems likely if you wanted to switch the world's data centers to it, you'd be stuck condensing it from the atmosphere, which is far more expensive than collecting it from natural gas. I haven't done the math. I'm curious if someone else has.
Basically they just lost everyone. The best explanation I heard was this quote, I forget by who-

"The government are now pulling on levers that they have not realised are no longer connected to anything"

Changing the rules may have made sense, but only if anyone was even remotely close to obeying them. I follow the rules as closely as I know how, and even I have been lost many times. Most people have completely given up.
Not sure who in your target audience can pay $2 but not $5/month but why not add a premium plan with as extra the priority support?
meditation

moved to the Appalachia’s
Its too bad you didnt title it:

(((a rabbit hole of lisp)))