skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, look what happened in India: Jio sank $N billion dollars on building out 4G everywhere, and a billion or so people got much better internet access. The answer is clear: we can get there by laying more of the kind of infrastructure we already have in the developed world, and it's just a matter of getting the will to put it in place.
Wow, this is about as exciting as when Kmart merged with Sears!
Keep on the search and play ads on youtube
You connect to Loon balloons with your regular cellphone whereas StarLink requires a "pizza-box-sized" antenna. They solve slightly different problems.
Google threatens to remove its search engine from Australia due to new law
The professional archivists stored all the unpublished Kennedy pictures in a vault in the bottom of the World Trade Center. Perfectly safe there. No need to make copies.
Kudos for sharing the location of relevant code. This is the kind of referencing we need
Interesting thanks. I don't think the idea makes any sense but as just a random weapon for going after big tech it would be effective for gm's comment. They could make it so it's just not worth it for Google to do search in Australia giving room for others
Worth remembering that Starlink is coming online relatively soon, and that Google put nearly $1B into SpaceX 5 years ago.

It looks to me like Google made a couple of bets over the last 10 years on different paths to getting worldwide internet access.

One path is looking more promising than the other, so they're culling now.
Huh. I'm pretty sure I remember blog posts by Scott Siskind back in the early 2010's. And I've never heard of Scott Alexander. So that was a weird perspective to come at this post from. I wish him the best of luck.
This is not a Google Project, it's an Alphabet 'Moonshot' designed to maybe shake things up, create a market, discover new solutions/opportunities/induce investment with a very high risk profile and no obviously commercial outcome i.e. quasi NGO stuff that VC's won't touch.

There's no way to compare Loon to a regular commercial venture.

It's just stuff the founders want to do and that's fine.
I would recommend that you pick up a book like Code Complete (it may be old, but it is still good) and develop really solid habits about how you name variables, functions, break down your programs, and so on.

Getting the minutia right is the key to being able to write maintainable programs up to about 15k lines or so. That's when it starts to make sense to work on paying attention to the big picture while you're in the weeds. But if you're topping out at 500-1000 lines, that's where your problems likely are.

(It probably isn't helping you that you're used to using tools that let you not think about the minutia up front and then help you to fix them after the fact.)
They have at least a dozen services that have over a billion users. Others not mentioned in your list: Youtube, Photos, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Docs. And probably slightly more trivial ones like translate, calendar, flights, news, finance, and other stuff that are kinda part of search. Their hardware/home line isn't doing that bad either.
agreed. The printf style API is great for deferred/asynchronous log formatting via serialization.
"All votes are representative, but some votes are more representative than others."
My understanding is that there was a criminal investigation of Clinton's Marc Rich pardon that concluded without finding any evidence of criminality. I'm not raising this as a defense of his making that pardon, but rather, to point out that a President selling pardons is and has long been considered a serious crime. The Clinton precedent is a clear illustration https://goodpornsites.pro/ . Saying "hey, some book alleges Clinton got paid for a pardon, therefore it's common practice" sounds nice, but ignores the fact that suspicion around Clinton's Marc Rich pardon triggered an extensive criminal investigation that concluded he did not, in fact, get paid for it.
Huh? This just seems like a bunch of name-calling.

> I don't know about you, but to me it seems like a comical case of the psychiatrist being the one who's in need of help.

In what way? Can you spell it out a little? What about "Lorien", "Valinor" and rationalist blog posts indicates a problem?
Ah, this will be yet another case-study in patent and license law.

Reminds me of the cisco router firmware fiasco.

Looks like a few elastic lawyers are about to get sacked.
This is quite a surprise. Only recently, Loon collaborated with seasoned reinforcement learning researchers to build more efficient navigation controllers for the balloons, titled "Autonomous navigation of stratospheric balloons using reinforcement learning" [1]. Although, it would appear that much of the gains come from a simulator that they've been developing for a while.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8
I think the days of Google Moonshots are coming to a close. In general Google hasn't been very good at shooting for the moon. They've lost their leadership and vision and all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth.

Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?
Yes! For instance, the Albertsons/Vons/Pavilions grocery chain recently fired all its in-house delivery drivers and contracted with Doordash instead, in order to take advantage of Doordash's access to (cheaper) Prop 22 drivers.

https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e89...

And yes, this shift was widely predicted by Prop 22's opponents. The only surprise is how fast it's happening.
IBM builds their own line of processors and operates some of the biggest supercomputers (e.g. Summit at Oak Ridge). I know at least one guy who works on a pretty ambitious project at Google, and last I talked to him, he lusted after the insanely crazy things he used to get to do in an IBM-internal dev shop.
Gmail? Youtube? GCP? Waymo? Maps? Calendar? Google Suite? Google docs/drive/sheets/etc? Google Analytics?
There's a new formatting library in C++20. Unlike printf, it's type-safe, and it's extensible to new types.
Great work by @patio11 and gang.

If only the actual vaccine rollout could have gone better. California is languishing in the 48-49th position out of 50 states with only the likes of Alabama and Missouri below it in vaccination rates.
The conclusions are a bit too simplistic.

A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused.

A museum preserves cultural heritage.

The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years.

Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now.

So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage.

Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.
You're right, and this very polite lack of awareness of race is one of the huge problems with his writing.

Lack of cultural competence causes huge problems for black people who seek mental health treatment. The answer is emphatically not this blank state stuff, but more awareness.
Spotify is working on TikTok-style player UI
Enjoy the Cerebral Benefits of Giving
Discovery is another. "Differential dataflow" and "timely dataflow" don't quite convey clearly what problem they're solving or what machine characteristics they rely on or even where to expect more performance from them and how. Not saying that they aren't performant, but we need to say how and where pretty clearly.

For example, Spark makes it clear that its performance comes from exclusively in-memory compute across a cluster.

Spark may also be "good enough" from a performance standpoint for many use cases. New tools can get adoption among small players only if they are radically easier to use and deploy.
I could see why one would think bots, but it’s far more likely the group-think you’re feeling.
Cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and Alberta's oil dependent economy
MySQL Configuration Performance Tuning Workflow
They also have maps, gmail, docs, drive, translate, calendar, photos, scholar, and lately Stadia.
Waymo seems like it's nearing its final stages. I have high hopes!
github = microsoft = it will be changed to work within the china system
Wow, this is wild. Let me see if I can summarize from my quick read of the links people have posted (just a summary, not claiming those links are correct).

The catalyst event happening is apparently an impending "short squeeze" for GameStop (GME) stock. The underlying issue is being painted as a power struggle between individuals ("retail investors") and hedge funds / institutional investors.

The idea of the short squeeze is that institutional investors short-sold GME, meaning they took money in exchange for a promise to deliver shares later. This seemed safe because they thought it would be easy to buy cheap shares later and deliver as they are supposed to.

However, the share price started going up. People know the holders of shorts will need to buy back shares, so people (wallstreetsbets people?) buy the shares first. This drives up the price even more, increasing the potential desperation of the shorts-holders, and this cycle can theoretically get really vicious really fast, leading to a "squeeze". So retail investors are hoping to make a bunch of money off the institutional investors holding the shorts. In theory, if everyone bought Gamestop shares and refused to sell, the holders of shorts would be failing to fulfill their contract and be in huge trouble (but they will pay big prices first).

This leads to the David-and-Goliath story. The claim is that institutional investors are actively trying to paint reddit as market manipulators, in an attempt (either short or long term) to get regulators to shut down individual investing and tilt the field more to institutions. This narrative is aided by WSB trends to invest as a block in "meme stocks".

On the other hand, redditors are painting the institutions as serial entrenched market manipulators who got caught with their pants down in this instance, and who are trying dirty tricks to get out of a sticky situation.

Did I get it right?
I wholesale agree with your criticism of the current system, the status quo is not what i'm advocating for.

That said, an unintended consequence of the proposed policy, especially if we extend it to tv, is people simply have less exposure to the decision making process. I don't know if I am willing to make that trade. I don't like the idea of a president being able to hide behind the vale of formal behavior. If my president is a white supremacist sympathizer, I want to know. Scratch that, I deserve to know.

I realize public politicking is currently partisan theater, I'm not trying to deny that either. Still, even from that purview there may be hope, the more we are exposed to it, the sooner we'll grow tired and do something about it with our votes. I don't know enough about the politicians from that state to qualify if it was a good thing or not, but Georgia just went blue during a runoff of all things! I'm sure part of that was fueled by the president's voter fraud saber rattling.

I know its hard to separate the person from the idea, but I really loved that the president, not his staff, tweeted. From it I learned that he either believes or is while to spread conspiratorial narratives as long as he sees a benefit from it. The things he tweeted seemed way worse than the "Smart people said that..." / "I heard that..." kinda stuff he did during his rallies. That is a character flaw I don't want thumbing over the button.
Costco does delivery through their website. But it’s not same day.
Brain is doing great and Waymo probably at least hits close.
Talking about X more generally, their Gimbal book is interesting:

https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Gimb...

I think their self-driving cars project is probably what X could be at its peak, incredibly challenging projects, high profit potential, well financed.

Projects like loon seem more like a project that a university would get grant funding to finance.
_The_ moonshot, Waymo. People are sleeping on that you can hop in a perfectly safe robotaxi today, the ride along videos are stunning.
Well if you want to attempt something big without having to work with company's like Google then Elon Musk made an interesting offer today.

Musk is offering $100 million to the team providing the best carbon capture technology.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-musk-carbon-capture/e...
Please read my comment again. I didn't say no statically typed languages support them.

But your Java example isn't a true heterogeneous lists, very close but not really. You cannot put instances of value types into it.

Even if it were a true heterogeneous list. You have given up on static typing with such a list and defer it to runtime. Which is exactly the dynamic typing approach.
He is a racist, his arguments are bad, and his site tolerated fascists for years.
Free speech is a concept that exists outside of the US.

Free speech is about being able to express ideas and these can be supressed by private entities, communities or a number of non-government entities like a church.
Keep in mind android they bought, then the leader of that project "resigned" for sexual harassment. So it's continuing but I doubt it'll be more than incremental improvements, as we've seen in the past 5 versions.

But I think Gmail and Maps were fairly innovative products when they came up. Both in terms of "wow I didn't think this would be possible before" and being viable businesses.
> You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it.

I may just be my misunderstanding. I get the feeling in these discussions, that people think things like deplatforming, etc. are generally and always wrong and people/institutions speaking about it (such as Mozilla) are bad. If that is considered a strawman, then I am glad.
I really don't like it.

I'm not mad others like things I don't.

I guess what does bug me is, the type of people who generate and like this kind of drivel have a strong tendency to walk around thinking they know better than Literally Everyone(tm), while not realizing they themselves in fact know next to nothing about all these fields and topics, and are themselves really no better than anti-vaxxers or chrystal healers - they'll literally just make up and believe anything as long as it comes with the right labels and has a certain air of what they perceive as rationality to it. For some reason, the HackerNews and Tech scene in general are very susceptible to this. (techies share the bizarre hubris of thinking they know better than everyone at everything, and can improve and "disrupt" any field)

Economics and health care especially are apparently "solved" fields where literally every one of these people are actually hidden gem PhD level experts. If you think I'm exaggerating, ask them a question about economics or health care, and listen as they "expertly" explain Everything(tm) to you.

Ffs, even the label "rationalist" itself is pathetic, and very revealing. It's basically a way to signal "I am right, take my word for it".
Your argument is based on a perception of America favoring right extremist ideology. Meanwhile for every popular extreme ideology on the right there is a counter extreme on the left ideology.

We have people advocating for extreme capitalism and people advocating for a socialist regime. Opposed citizen militias such as Proud Boys and Antifa. Individuals who want a wall around the country and people who believe in open borders. The examples don’t end there.

We have extremes with plenty of support on both ends and unless you can bring data that indicates there is a concentration of individuals in one side, you cannot infer America is becoming far right, or assume that the center is skewed to the right.
It's unbelievable that any form of unclearable cache is allwoed to exist.

"Clear Browsing Data" must clear ALL browser data, as if I was doing a completely fresh install of my browser but maintaining my settings, extensions, bookmarks, and auto-fill.

That is IT. Yes, Google Chrome, you must also delete Google cookies (which they do not do).
Starlink made this obsolete before it launched
Senator Bragg said it was impossible to assess its value to the local market.

“All we’ve got today is your threats and your blackmail,” he told Silva.

Blackmail! What is Senator Bragg hiding?
Haaaaa story time.

Had a flat. Not a big deal; got the spare on, schedule some time at the mechanics to get a new tire. Tire gets put on, everything is great, time passes.

Later, come back for a regularly scheduled tire rotation. "We can't get the lug nuts off. They've been over tightened." the mechanic says. "Well, how do you suppose that happened?" I ask. Of course, it goes a. completely over that their head, (they were the last ones to touch the lug nuts) and of course, b., it's my wallet that pays for their error.

They were not the mechanic for a while after that. Aside from that gaffe they did good work, and everybody else I tried for a while was all around worse. Eventually returned to them, and that was really the only problem I ever had…
Actually, your argument that there’s any relevance to Elastic being the primary developer lacks insight. It changes nothing about the licensing situation nor about the ethics. You’re also not factoring in the fact that the nonrestrictive license is why Elasticsearch became the standard.

You also haven’t resolved the logical contradiction that Elastic is equally “guilty” of profiting off of Lucene.

I honestly don’t think a nuanced understanding of these licenses and open source business models can lead to any conclusion except this one: Amazon is not in the wrong here, Elastic is being entitled, misleading and duplicitous. Elastic is free to use Lucene as its kernel and monetize it, and Amazon is free to offer a managed Elasticsearch service.

If you write Apache 2.0 software, you have no right to bitch about competition. That’s the short of it. And remember - Elastic is doing fine. They’re worth $15B. The founder has hundreds of millions of dollars now, and rightly so.
Not sure whether it's a serious or funny/GPT question,

But I did survive, but had to shutdown my startup anyways[2].

[2]https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...
Tech for Web Development in 2021
Section 230 liability protection is the lifeblood of these businesses. That protection is worth billions of dollars. While the courts might be unwilling to go there, Congress should define the obligations that come with such a valuable grant from the public in law. My proposal is that the law should be reformed such that moderation decisions made by section 230 interactive computer services should be logged and reviewable (at the plantiff's expense) in a reputable third party arbitration venue of the service's choosing.
Frank McSherry .. the one behind the timely dataflow library and materialize.com .. did show many years ago that there is plenty of performance headroom above Spark by showing how one laptop can beat a Spark cluster.

"Scalability .. but at what COST?"
http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf
> Are there places that with no construction in popular urban areas where prices truly don’t rise?

As the other comment suggested, there are pretty run down areas that tend to not increase as much or even decrease (in extreme cases). Revitalized areas are going to tend to be more expensive than non-revitalized areas. You'll see a lot of this if you live in a city and follow redevelopment efforts and which neighborhoods change over time (IE, neighborhood A, B, and C are poor, C gets a big development push, C becomes more expensive than A and B).

Also worth noting that amenities don't simply increase or decrease, but they shift. Supermarkets from the same chain in the same city can have cheaper, lower quality food in poorer areas and more expensive, higher quality food in wealthier neighborhoods.

> Though at that point what’s the policy: suppress housing supply and keep areas burnt out and crime ridden to deter outsiders? Not so great for quality of life or the tax base

It depends on your goals. I'm generally in favor of development, but others have goals that are different from my own. There are long time residents that feel that the disruptions these changes bring outweigh the good. Even things that get overlooked like there being fewer local cheap eateries because of increasing commercial rent, or more police attention driving away crime (a good thing) but also street vendors, or the percentage of the people you know and are able to talk to greatly decreasing (not uncommon in ethnic enclaves).
> This is a pointless ad hominem that is completely irrelevant to this case.

If you're trying to base your claims on appeals to authority, the very least you should do is verify what your authority defends and stands for and what it's track record.

Brushing off holes in your appeal to authority with empty references to ad hominem a does nothing to substantiate your claim.
Someone needs to do a study on government waiting lists. I was a government employee for a year and so many things just sit and rot in a pile waiting to be addressed.

I sent a letter asking for info on a family member to the government archivist, and I am likely to get an answer in 2023 or 2024.

When I was in government, I worked in parking management. We just kept generating an ever bigger backlog of images to process.

Granted, neither of those are particularly high priority, but my point is that lagging government is a problem all over the place.

There are probably many waiting lists like this species one which are causing substantial harm because nothing can get prompt attention.
If you're interested, check out Abseil's StrFormat [0] for a typesafe printf replacement that uses format strings. You get a nice speed up as well.

[0] https://abseil.io/docs/cpp/guides/format
And it's horrible. I was a dedicated manual driver, but 3 years in an Outback with CVT and flappy paddles - it's miserable as an analogy of shifting. You can trigger several "down shifts", but there's some elastic feel in the system that doesn't convert to slowing the car via engine revs or give the feeling of immediate power. I gave up on the paddles early on.
We live at a bottom of an ocean. It's a shame we can't get long lasting submersibles to go mainstream, even if it makes sense on paper.

Starlink might be a historic inflection point, like the Haber–Bosch process or the internet 1.0, but it won't solve the mobile phone gap. Maybe the market might solve that.
Police arrest 320 dangerous UK child sex offenders
That's what moonshots are though, there is a high statistical possibility that 0/100 makes it.
> the pi was probably faster than it.

If we're talking about 90s or early 2000s Sun, probably. Even then, though, these systems probably had substantially better I/O performance.

I have a SPARC laptop lying around from 1995 that gets a whopping 20 MB/s in disk read/write speeds across its dual half height SCSI drives. That still beats all but the best SD cards.

The full size systems with SAS and other options would get even better disk performance.
HHGTTG was absolutely trying to emulate The Sirens Of Titan. They're both great though.
I use iOS, and have no love for Android but... that's an insane statement.

There's almost 3 billion android phones out there, and one guy leaving isn't going to cause Google to throw up their hands and shrug. Phones are just really, really good now, and there's not much you can really innovate on.
A robotaxi without a human driver! For some reason Waymo seems way ahead of everyone else in self-driving
At the risk of being offtopic, this is exactly the type of pedantry that keeps me coming back here.