skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In most fields papers / articles are still the one critical metric crucial for career advancement. You will sit on data and code until you are ready to publish, sometimes for years.

Datasets and analytical code must be regarded as a scientific achievement on its on, albeit not as substitute for the "full" substantive analysis in a paper.

A social science PhD in Denmark, for example, must write two to four peer reviewed papers at the moment. The option to substitute one of the articles with a data set?

Things get better though: People nowadays at least understand my citations better, since I cite at least the explicitly included R-packages used in my work.
Takeaways from My Failed Bootstrapped SaaS Business
99% invisible had an episode on this https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/
The problem is that "their cut" of the profits was defined as precisely 0%, as per their original license terms.
As someone who is a Catholic first and politically more conservative second, the question of Unions is pretty interesting.

Catholic teaching says that in principle, unions can do a lot of good, see for example:

> The most important of all [voluntary associations] are workingmen's unions, for these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers' guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness...
(http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...,

> Among the basic rights of the human person is to be numbered the right of freely founding unions for working people. These should be able truly to represent them and to contribute to the organizing of economic life in the right way. Included is the right of freely taking part in the activity of these unions without risk of reprisal. Through this orderly participation joined to progressive economic and social formation, all will grow day by day in the awareness of their own function and responsibility, and thus they will be brought to feel that they are comrades in the whole task of economic development and in the attainment of the universal common good according to their capacities and aptitudes.
(http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_counc...)

When I read those descriptions, and compare that to either the limited experience I had working for a company that was largely unionized or the stories that I've heard or read about, I'm not sure how often these apply outside of a few genuinely dangerous occupations.

See as one example how some unions have argued that union jobs should be exempted from minimum wage laws (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-..., https://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/documents/file..., https://padailypost.com/2018/04/02/minimum-wage-law-includes...). Evidently, unions see an opportunity to grow their market share by lowering their prices (i.e., wages of labor), and do so by lobbying Congress from exemptions from law, which is the very thing that they claim corporations are evil for doing and that we need unions to exist in order to stop. The argument is that unions are able to negotiate better benefits, but they don't argue for an exemption from minimum wage if the employer provides a certain level of benefits, they argue for an exemption specifically for using unionized labor.

Are there good unions and good union leaders out there? Sure, but I think this example shows that unions in themselves do not advance the "whole task of economic development and in the attainment of the universal common good," but are instead subject to incentives and respond to them the way any other organization does, and very often the incentives of the union leadership is different than those doing the actual work.
Yeah let's talk about greed for a second.

Elastic, at this moment, is pulling in half a billion dollars in revenue per year. They're growing at at least 40% y/y. They're valued at $15B at this very moment.

So, tell me again why this license change is so necessary? Oh right, it's not, it's just a disingenuous move to try to monopolize the market they're in.

Except, the irony is, this isn't even going to increase the money they're making, because Amazon, as I predicted days ago, was always just gonna fork 7.1.0 and keep it Apache 2.0. Which is not only legally their right, but actually ethically is a good thing to do anyway.

And don't even get me started on how Elastic puts most of its real efforts into their proprietary features anyway, and if you hypothetically opened up a pull request that perfectly implemented TLS or some other feature they'd deny it because they have a conflict of interest with X-Pack.

Now I want to be clear. I'm personally an anarcho-capitalist, I reject the whole idea that a company being big makes it evil. I don't think it's a problem that Amazon is making money with free software - aren't all of us in the industry making money with Linux, or with apache httpd, or <insert open source software here>?

So, I don't hold the fact that Elastic is a multi billion dollar company against them either. But when they try to gaslight the communtity and portray this absurd, patently false, downright offensive david vs goliath narrative, I'm going to call them out for being liars, because that's what they are. They have shown they will break deep promises they made to the community without a second thought.

They've also shown they couldn't even be honest in their communication around this licensing change. They claimed this would have no effect on their users - bullshit, a good friend of mine works at Wikimedia and they can't run Elasticsearch 7.1.1 or above in the future because they don't run proprietary software. Meanwhile the license change doesn't even do what they claim it's for.

They also have mastered the art of doublespeak like this:

> The list of improvements under this new free and open, yet proprietary, license, is overwhelming

Ah yes, the infamous "free and open, yet proprietary" software. Couldn't live without it.
There are 2 core issues with this.

The first is that pay per click encourages bs clickbait nonsense. That's exactly what we don't want. "5 Reasons it's the Jews fault you're fat" is gonna get a lot more money than actual investigative journalism on an important but boring topic.

Second, the sites all steal from each other. When one paper actually does an investigation, spends a shit tonne of time and money, takes a risk and finds something, every other paper prints the same story reworded 5 minutes later. Why should anyone but the first paper get paid?

As usual, "something much be done and this is something". I'm actually no averse to finding news, quite the opposite. I just think to many programs are there to funnel money to the likes of Murdoch. No one has worked out how to make journalism pay in the digital age yet...
The situation can escalate very quickly in a fighter jet so that leaving the last resort to late could be fatal. Encouraging ejection may be a good idea when the pilots natural inclination is always to stay with the plane.
They're not. They're a competitor to Twitter, and they're claiming (or attempting to, at least) that Amazon colluded with Twitter to keep them out of the market.
Not the person you responded too, but I imagine you could likely get a custom firmware to allow biometrics whenever, if you can replace the kernel, you can generally make the device behave however you'd like.
The way I program, I'm actually an arsonist.
In 1655 an astronomer discovered Saturn's moon Titan. He wasn't sure of his observation but wanted to preserve his priority. So he scrambled text of his discovery in an order only he knew (a private key) and published the resulting gibberish. In this way he made it possible to verify himself later as an author of the discovery. Maybe not a very strong encryption by today's standards, but good enough for the time.
Large companies have monetized open source for decades, ever since open source has existed. Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon..the list is endless. I can't imagine why people will quit the open source movement now because they realize they can't make money from it – that has always been true. Writing FOSS to get rich has always been an oxymoron.
I don't quite understand your logic here. Does he deserve to be a trillionaire? Maybe? Does Jeff Bezos deserve his whole net worth just because he acquired it legally?
> Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand and pretend the risk of de-platforming never existed.

Im with everything your post says, but I’m not even fully convinced this is an issue.

Twitter can argue a good faith effort and point to millions of accounts and posts it has removed–from all political persuasions. It can also point to constant policy changes to address what Amazons policy sees as a very real problem.

parler on the other hand has had its ceo say quite clearly that they have zero intention as a company to even address this problem.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/
Far right extremists are not a protected class.
LGBTQ is a protected class.
A business can choose to not to serve a far right extremist based on their far right extremism.
A business cannot choose to not serve a gay person because they are gay.
So tired of seeing this false equivalency being posted here and elsewhere.
> The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value

That's an interesting claim, especially since you don't specify _stable_ store of value. Do you believe that trading cards are not a store of value? Or shares? The only inherent value of a trading card is that you can wipe your ass with it or set it on fire to stay warm, and yet people often pay hundreds of dollars (or more!) for them.
Show HN: I hate waiting on hold with the bank so I made an app that waits for me
Hi HN!

I've been dealing with banks, telehealth, and CRA a ton these days over the phone. I guess a lot of others have too since the hold times have been ridiculous. I built a little tool that waits on hold on my behalf and calls me when an agent is on the other line. It's saved me some time so I thought I'd share it with others: https://youcallme.io

I generated a few quick access pages for the worst offenders too: e.g. https://youcallme.io/wayfair https://youcallme.io/chase-bank https://youcallme.io/jetblue-airways https://youcallme.io/walmart and a bunch others.

Would love to hear if you find it useful for yourself
Yes, you can customize the config on Dell's site to upgrade the memory.
This author has also proposed that the solar system has already been visited:

"‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."[0]
The rest of the paper covers the possibility that the ‘Oumuamua object was sent unintentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf
You should contact PlusAI. Their self-driving truck drove across the country by itself. Putting them into a "convoy" of trucks essentially makes them into a "land train".
>- Correct. My point is that Packinghan, viewed in combination with Marsh, provides an interesting lens for issues concerning potentially monopolistic behavior. IF data storage and/or social media can be viewed as critical digital infrastructure, an argument can and will likely be made that the services are tantamount to a digital company owned town. We'll see! Either way it's very interesting and highly relevant to the industry.

How on earth is Amazon kicking them off "monopolistic behavior"? There are literally thousands of hosting providers in just about every country on this planet. Parler was quick to point out none of their infrastructure is in any way tied to Amazon.
Frankly, it's my new social media addiction. It just has the added benefit of being (mostly) educational and intellectually stimulating. Just enough for me to feel like I'm not really wasting time.
We've made Scylla as async, shared nothing as possible, and we've also started adding C++20 coroutines (to replace futures/promises). We'll be doing more of that in 2021.

https://www.scylladb.com/2021/01/12/making-scylla-a-monstrou...
Dell makes it easier than it should be by having absurd markups on storage.
> Totally "open" open source only works if everyone is a good actor

Totally open source works fine, it's when you try to mix open source with a controlling entity and a business model. You can only get away with that as long as you've got a lock on expertise and development. As soon as a significant portion of development and expertise is coming from outside, what makes the original business entity any more appealing than those others (as in this case)?

One way to stave that off for a while might be to make sure you're releasing new features you've developed at a good clip, and as you've developed them you're naturally going to have more expertise. That likely only works for so long though, most projects hit some level of maturity eventually at which point new features are somewhat superfluous, and might even be detrimental.

I think the bottom line is that if a business is based on an open source product then that business should be looking at it as something with a life, and a coming natural death (of being able to be the only/main support company for it at least), and plan accordingly. It might not happen, but you can't count on it being exclusive forever, especially if it's actually lucrative.
Partially, yes.

Oh, and one other thing- they disabled my account silently, no notification, no email, call, sms, anything. Found out only when one of my friends called to ask why my address was bouncing emails. As my account was disabled, I could not even easily submit a support ticket as a customer (which requires to be logged in), had to use some contact form on their website.
For what it's worth I have found Fastmail's documentation to be really good. Whenever I had to look up things like configuring email clients or their spam rules I have been pleasantly surprised.
It really is. “Open source” good, “closed source” bad. This is embarrassing.
A real OSINT archive box would also capture all non-inline JavaScript, CSS and blob: files.
I will say this - at least in my local bay area Whole Foods, which I know isn't instacart anymore; there are the online shopper order fillers, they work IN the store but clearly not FOR the store.

I'm going to sound like a huge snob, but it makes the in-store shopping experience much less pleasant. The actual whole food workers are always there for you and go out of their way to help you, I don't expect the online shopper order fillers to help me, but they at best DGAF about the in-store shoppers and at worst are hostile towards them.

They speed past people and around corners with carts, cut in line at the fruits and veggies, ask WF employees to help them find items while you've waited to talk to them and in return, flat out ignore actual in-store shoppers when they ask for help. If you're out of the tech loop and don't realize that they are incentivized to fill orders, you might think the online shopper fillers are part of the WF staff there to help you. Knowing this, it's not too jarring to me to see a customer go up to one of them and have their many 'excuse me's just ignored, not even acknowledged.

They need shirts that say don't ask me for help; I know the way they are incentivized to fill as many orders is what creates this behavior - that needs to be looked at as well in my opinion.
Popular OSS licenses were designed in an era to allow direct customers (businesses) to directly install and use the software, and redistribution means only distributing the package.

Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing, that large, profitable middlemen will directly host the software, pass through just the API, with zero customer exposure to the running instance.

AWS taking advantage of this — yeah sure it may be legal, like how business lobbying senators for obvious policy hacks is legal — but doesn't mean it's fair or acceptable. It's totally OK to call them out here and not reward them for it.
> Even Iraq managed to capture US and allied pilots

Uh-Huh. Thirty (repeat 3-0) years ago.
The Widevine team themselves suggested building the same exact system on top of a proprietary Electron fork.

> The Castlabs Electron implementation would be your only path of support. Otherwise, we don't have the resources to support at this time.

So Electron is not the reason this request was denied.

You're not wrong that Google is blocking login from embedded webviews, but the thing is that Google is separately blocking logins from embedded webviews. It's a different situation that's unrelated to their Widevine licensing. If what you were saying was correct, then the Castlabs Electron framework[0] wouldn't have Widevine support, and it does.

It's not about embedded engines, it's about Open Source.

----

> which is why the inclusion of DRM in webstandards was widely debated in the first place.

My take on this is that you would be right -- it would be weird to complain about Google refusing to set up a licensing scheme for Widevine -- if not for the fact that:

A) they were a part of the campaign for DRM inclusion in the first place, even while people argued that it would hamper browser innovation, so the problem we're in is in no small part their fault,

B) the fact that they control both Widevine licensing and the dominant desktop browser (and the fact that they have used that control to harass even mainstream browsers like Brave[1]) constitutes something at least adjacent to anticompetitive behavior,

and C) the fact that they're willing to license Widevine to Open Source browsers like Brave and Firefox suggests that there isn't a fundamental problem with Open Source that means it couldn't interact with this DRM in a way that's acceptable to Google.

Add those 3 points together, and I feel like it's reasonable to ask Google what they're doing and why they're doing it, and to expect them to have some kind of answer as to how they're going to maintain control of Widevine without cutting off the legs of browser innovation and using web standards to shut out competitors.

[0]: https://github.com/castlabs/electron-releases

[1]: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/10449#issueco...
You just made an unwarranted assumption that I live in a suburb that is trying to make itself a tech fish trap. That isn’t the case at all and shows your bias.

The suburb I live in has few tech jobs. In fact it has relatively few jobs at all. Most revenue comes from property taxes. Furthermore, it has shown no interest in attracting tech jobs. It doesn’t even have many fish traps. I think it has two such fish traps for perhaps 50-100 people out of a total population approaching 27000.

It seems to be attracting people due to geography, quality of life, and relatively good schools. The number of children has gone up something like 70% in the last 10 years. It was also rated a top 10 small town/city in the US.
I would argue that multi-line anonymous functions are unpythonic. Exhibit A is this line from PEP 20:

Readability counts.

I'm currently about a month into learning a legacy codebase that was written in a functional language. If I could single out one thoroughly egregious practice that has made this code far, far more difficult to read and understand than it should have been, it's multi-line anonymous functions. In general, if a function is doing something complicated enough to need multiple lines of code, it's doing something complicated enough to merit an explicit name.
I mostly agree with him, but very hard to say it's wrong to speculate on crypto/bitcoin. I personally know at least two people who do not have to work because of the amount of money they made from bitcoin (they were very early adopters). Yes, it is largely building castles in the sky, but some people will get genuinely wealthy from it.

In my opinion you should approach it like you would any other form of speculation: risk what you're comfortable losing and have a plan for when you'll take your winnings.
> Hard to believe Microsoft was so utterly reviled by competent people in 2007.

As someone who was there, I have no problem believing it.

If you were doing _anything_ that touched anything unixy in the 90s until the mid aughts MS wasn't just "uncool", they were actively "the enemy" directly competing against everything you did. After a while that adversarial relationship turned into joking with your peers about every mis-step they made. It didn't help that they seemed to make a lot of mis-steps and put a lot of effort into things that turned into dead ends.

They had to put a _lot_ of work into re-establishing their reputation this past decade.
> that is simple for other people to host

Literally one of the selling points of ES amongst my peers was that it was easier to set up to host in a multi-node cloud than the earlier Solr.

Which is great, good for them! But... yeah.
Are you suggesting that the novichok poisoning was faked? That seems less plausible than the alternative, that they just failed to guess the dose correctly, in an abundance of caution (trying to get him to die somewhere far from the scene of the crime).
Next time, go commercial from get go.
As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China
Yeah, those requirements are quite steep for what Parler does. That being said, it is actually incredibly hard to scale any product that sees a sudden massive influx of users, media attention, and conflict like this. I mean this from a purely technical standpoint.

If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on optimizing the stack to improve efficiency. It's also way more realistic to scale up your infrastructure in the short run until you know you've stabilized at a point where you can purchase and operate dedicated hardware to offset the steep margins cloud providers charge.

On top of it all, their product itself seems off-putting to a large portion of tech workers, which would make hiring talented individuals even harder.
I've done both. Clutch dumps require that you rev the engine up to high RPMs first. Instant torque is, well, instant.

I suggest you try it before you make fun of it.
Once they have all the logistics in place sure, but even for a company like Kroger, which is on the larger side, it's a huge undertaking. Once you tack on liability and other issues, it's a huge project just to get going.
The story ends (so far) with me filing a GH issue and offering a PR, my own benchmarking getting an average 3x speedup over a wide range of inputs. I happen to know that the maintainer has been on vacation for the last week and only got back a few days ago so no further discussion has been had yet.
> you'd have to believe that Amazon's lawyers are so stupid that they set out a TOS for the world's largest hosting provider that didn't give AWS the right to boot customers

I absolutely agree with you. This is as true now as it has ever been, since the earliest days of purely commercial httpd hosting operations in like, 1994 or thereabouts.

Long before the existence of individual virtual machines that anyone with a credit card could rent, hosting companies and colocation/datacenter type places have regularly declined to do business with customers they perceive as toxic, and have ended hosting relationships with customers they no longer wanted.