skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with overseeing interstate electricity sales. By not crossing state lines, Texas utilities avoided being subjected to federal rules.”

That’s pretty much all it says.

About a year ago I was driving through Nebraska and got caught in a blizzard. I had never even seen snow before. I was on a back road in the middle of nowhere with a quarter tank. If there hadn’t been a whiteout, it would have been flatness as far as the eye could see. The wind was sucking the heat out of the car so quickly that it was only 70F with the heat on full blast recirculating. Called 911 and they told me they can’t get anyone to me,
good luck. Most awkward goodbye of my life. The nearest town was 20 miles away on a road made out of ice with ditches on either side. I accepted death and just kept creeping forward. Was saved by a farmer and had a panic attack the next morning long after the danger had passed...

I often wondered how people can go their whole lives not knowing how to deal with weather that is so common. Even in Sweden the military had to create a training program for Swedes that forgot how to stay safe in cold weather without access to heated buildings. Even the Swedes don’t know how to do it because they’re only cold for 5 minutes between buildings. If the polar vortex decided to descend like this onto California or Texas in a serious way, not a wimpy 0F but -30F, thousands would perish. And the crazy thing is that surviving those temps is trivial, you just need some key knowledge and equipment.
As Derek says at the end, there is an oral version of the drug.
> Apple has the right to create the software ecosystem they want to create.

So say you. I say that consumers have the right to run whatever software they want on the hardware that they have purchased.

Apple can create whatever software platform they want, but it seems pretty bad that they don't allow you to use whatever software platform you want on the hardware that you paid them for.
Is that the art of persuasion or the art of propaganda?
Suggesting that iOS should not be more like literally the most vibrant, healthy, popular computing platform ever created (Windows) is borderline delusion.

The Mac is great, but the Mac App Store is garbage. And that's the iOS analogue there. That's because Mac has alternatives; centralized, forced big-tech App Stores don't work in the face of alternatives. The only platforms they have worked on (iOS, lesser degree Android) only work because of the Big Tech monopoly.

What sucks more for consumers: Having to install the Epic Games Store to play Fornite, or not being able to play Fortnite? Those are your two options. You want to believe there's a third option where Big Tech Opoly is allowed to run a centralized draconian app store for perfect user UX. This third option does not exist; its availability over the past decade was a blip destined for the footnotes of history.

Hell, go over to Linux and juggle the multiple package managers and package availability between them. That's the natural state of the world; developers hold the cards, and they'll do what is best for their business. The App Store is fighting against nature, and that fight is always a losing one. Always. There is no third option; its just a matter of time.
Thanks for reporting. We need to add it for sure!
I'd rather Amazon, EA, Blizzard & cie have no choice.
You mentioned it yourself, most third party developers still use the Google Play Store on Android. The same will be true if the App Store continues to provide a better user experience. You might need to pay a little more for a game from the App Store, but I'm willing to bet most people will pay for the peace of mind. Let people decide whether the Apple tax is worth it or not. Either way, you're going to end up with a more efficient system where end users are paying an Apple Tax that is closer to the cost of running the store.

This does mean that Apple will need to start upping their game by either lowering their fee (which means lower costs for you) or supporting other independent games that deserve attention in the App Store.

Furthermore, iOS is a well designed platform with very tight security restrictions. You don't need the App Store to do that, it's build into the platform.
You don't "rack up HR complaints" for swearing at Google. You definitely have to be an asshole for that to happen. One HR complaint? Maybe it could have been unreasonable. But multiple HR complaints? The probability of him not being an asshole seriously diminishes.

Source: I work at Google
> Employees with passion often perform better

That sounds really weird to me to bring up, regardless of whether it's true or not. As in this makes sense when you're thinking of trying to hire folks trying to gauge passion as a proxy for their performance when you can't directly observe it, but when they're working for you, you don't need proxies! You can directly observe performance!

So passion seems pretty irrelevant as soon as someone is hired, unless you're afraid of them jumping ship. But that's the nature of the beast. Employers can fire employees and employees can jump ship. Such is life.

> there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring passionate employees

I'm a bit confused; I mean there's nothing unfair about desires in general? Someone could want a billion dollars to fall from the sky into their lap and I might say "good luck," but there's nothing unfair about it. Employers might desire their employees to want literally zero pay and employees might desire their employers to give literally zero work. Good luck to the both of them.

The question then is not so much desires as it is the actual dynamics of the job itself and to what extent those desires are actually manifested in observable behavior.

I think the overarching theme that the_local_host was bringing up has to do with the language of morality in general.

You can talk about the employee-employer relationship in a very dispassionate sense as one of mutual transactional need with one discarding the other when one is no longer needed, which is fine. You can also talk about the relationship in the language of fairness and passion, which is also fine.

But there's something pretty unsettling about crossing the two together, especially when the perceived dynamic is that when it's convenient for the employer they slip into one or the other rather than when it's convenient for the employee.

EDIT: In response to your additional new line: "I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but passion is very highly correlated with job performance."

I think the original point of the_local_host's comment is that it's just kind of weird to talk about passion at all or whether an employee "should" do something or not or even the notion of employer/employee entitlement.

Just make the job expectations explicit. If an employer wants employees to work weekends make that explicit in the job description. If the employer wants a work product that a typical employee can only produce after 100 hours of work in a week then fine, ask for it, just make it clear upfront. If the employer wants employees to work extra hours for deadlines, fine just make it explicit.

The employee then takes it or leaves it. And from the employer side either the employee fulfills those expectations or doesn't.

But don't leave it implicit and then complain about the lack of passion, which is what I think the_local_host was pointing out.

(There's wider policy questions of whether you want to incentivize or disincentivize that behavior on a societal level, but that's an altogether different scope/level of conversation.)
Agreed. I have definitely been favoring platforms that let me run the binary directly, which is really just GOG, Patreon projects, and open-source.
Text of the relevant Australian law: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
Skin Whitening for Clubhouse, Anyone?
Certainly a curious API w/a 9.66B market cap powering clubhouse.
'Basic image enhancement Sets basic beauty effects, including skin smoothening, whitening, and cheek blushing. Image enhancement in a video call.
'
The mistake is using the word "startup", which originally had the implication of high growth and/or wide reach in a new market.

People who start lawn care businesses are unambiguously entrepreneurs and, in most cases, risk takers.

The article itself is also clickbait.
The reason why the FOI exception exists is because that is how the scheme ran in the US, and having political pressure on this program will kill it.

Also, remember that FOI isn't some magic tool for stopping corruption. Blair brought it in, and has said several times that it needs to be changed. FOI isn't public oversight.

The Conservatives are not proven to be corrupt. This self-evidently not true because no-one has proved it.
Intelligent, skilled, and well-educated people don't want to spend their lives being treated like garbage so they seek out employment that provides an environment for a healthy balanced life. As a result of attracting this talent, these companies become and continue to be successful. It's not that hard to understand.
I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let me clarify a bit.

Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web).

At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed that entire platform because of Ballmer (there's hints of your argument in this video, "we're making money with windows mobile"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

MSFT cloud wasn't doing well and was overly focused on .NET

They were too focused on Windows rather than recognizing the strategic value they could provide outside of it: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

Today I'd make a similar argument for Intel. Intel doubled down on old style fabs and is not competitive with TSMC. They failed to compete on mobile. They're ignoring the end of x86 and mocking Apple: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...

Increasing revenue is a good sign, but it matters how. If you're making short-term decisions to extract money from legacy stuff at the expense of new products - that's bad for your long-term future. It can take a while to catch up to you, but it eventually will. Then you'll just limp a long as a dinosaur that makes enough money to survive but nobody really wants to work there and you're done doing interesting projects. That's basically what I mean by irrelevant.
In contrast, Google has been making deals with Australian media companies:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-nine-agree-...
>When the virus first came up, it was completely unknown that the risk of long term impairment might have been, and now we know it was/is pretty severe.

Only 10% of positive cases (not including untested infections) have any impairment after 3 weeks.

https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-long-term?fbclid=IwAR1R...
ok you tell me how much I make
Maybe it can or should but when the ends justify the means and the goal is to scale your persuasion as far and wide as possible it seems to be tough to beat "us vs them" fear-based persuasion.
Even more fun: the relevant area of sea has had one million tons of explosives dumped there as well as chemical weapons and even some radioactive waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort%27s_Dyke
Google reportedly shut down its Stadia studios a week after praising them
What’s feesible? The tunnel or the bridge? I’d heard the tunnel wasn’t possible due to the particular geography of the channel. But a bridge? Now that I’d be interesting I seeing. There used to be a giants causeway across there in mythical times ...
There are single pictures you couldn't describe with terabytes of text(to a human, that is). Imagine for example trying to describe the milky way and northern lights. Yeah you could convey their looks in words but nobody is going to end up with the correct visual no matter how hard you try. Now add in other things, like emotion on people's faces. Some things just aren't possible to describe in full.
> The other thing I strongly agree with is working on things that don't add value to users but rather to follow company guidelines.

At face value, what you're agreeing with makes sense, and I'm a strong believer in questioning / re-affirming the "why" before taking on big projects.

But while the premise seems correct, his one example does not. FTA:

> we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.

This is a short sighted take, and ignores some of the reasons that such initiatives are often necessary (and I'd even argue...valuable). Two off the top of my head:

- Alignment with data retention policies = meet my expectations as a user about how Waze handles my data. I realize I'm in the minority by caring about this.

- Integration with standard tooling = easier for existing teams to contribute/maintain, less overhead managing disparate tooling, eventual gains in feature velocity which do equate to customer value.

So yeah, question the rationale for doing something, but look past your own immediate goals when evaluating the value of this kind of initiative.
And somewhere in that discussion, I hear a faint echo of "org-mode" being whispered : )
Jokes aside, I often notice, how I am more productive, when relying on plain text, than relying on "enterprise" wiki systems, which make it impossible to export to any useful further processable format (looking at you, Confluence). One of my favorite features is, that it is easy to put text under version control, so that diffs have a recognizable meaning.
Agreed - Pull Request was a bad example to use. You can still effectively achieve the same thing in a decentralized manner (i.e. without GitHub).
"“Although some people didn’t care for the snark.”"

Then don't give him so many opportunities to snark!

Corey's Last Week in AWS is one of my favorite things to discover in my inbox.
If arguing online has taught me anything, it's that you don't need to win a fight to persuade bystanders of your righteousness
Yeah i recall that essay. But getting a startup financed as a founder is a different story altogether. When you're asking people to invest on faith ( regardless of your MRR or what have you ), politics if back in the picture.
Forgot to mention the 27-story Houston Public Works building downtown which was built in the 1960's by HL&P still has the nicely air-conditioned parking garage.

No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't really matter to the power company.

No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that since the city took over the building in 1999.
It sucks way more to have a new app store per company.

as a user, I WANT a single app store, that is heavily curated.

As a surprise, who do NOT want that ? Companies already pushing garbage on my desktop computer so I can play their games.
I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I think I'm going to side with FB on this. The Australian government is once again showing absolute disregard when it comes to understanding technology, and its signature heavy handed approach to regulation.
These guys are funny and insightful. When I wrote in they actually answered my question.
The question is where to source alternatives. It is significantly harder to find products from alternative sources. For some products, the only solution is DIY.
Newsblur, which is a very good feed reader, has this feature built-in which is super handy to keep all this stuff in one place.
Lol, that the author isn't accounting for Bitcoins being used more than once makes this comparison one of the most laughable "bitcoin is too energy inefficient" arguments I've seen yet.

This is basically like saying, "If you only account for the first passenger on the bus, busses are way less efficient than everyone driving their own sportscar!".
"We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers. You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech."

The only thing worse than not putting the user first when you build consumer products is having a core attribute of your Googley culture be "put the user first" and not do it.
No download available? I thought it'd be fun to mess around with but maybe it's for paying customers only.
> Big companies over hire as time goes by, and the number of teams eventually outgrows the quantity of work. As a result, you have meetings all day to align, to coordinate, and to drive. The bigger an organization is, the more you hear about such phrases, and the more time you spend in meetings. BTW, I dare you to take away those meetings - so many people need those meetings to "assert influence", to get visibility, and to be promoted.

I think this is overly cynical. Big companies are typically further along the complexity curve. Complexity in engineering, but also sales, marketing, support, and growth opportunities (that is, growing revenue 25% is typically easier when you're revenue is $100K versus $100M).

That said, they are real differences. A lot of people aren't going to enjoy that type of work, and will opt-out of it. But a lot of the lower-risk, better pay will be in this space (a startup is high-risk, potentially incredible payout).
I'd like to thank Quad9 for being an adversary to bad actors, like my government.
100x this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

is a fundamental problem that can not go away, ever, and managing this is his job as a CEO / executive.

So this post is essentially an unwitting confession that he didn't understand what his job was, and how he failed at that.
My work and private data is stored on apples's systems, so either it's my rights to do as I please or their's.
You're misreading the sentence, he's not saying people should be fired for being old. He's saying at Google you can not fire someone for the "plain old reason" of "they're not doing a good job".

Having worked at Google, it is extremely difficult to fire a low performer. It takes about 6-12 months, many visits with HR, and a ton of documentation. So there is a common practice of managers trying to offload their low performers onto other teams, as mentioned in the post.
> inevitably 1am becomes 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, and at about 7am I will just stay up for 24 hours and start all over.

That's exactly my case. It's like having a 25 hours cycle instead of 24.
I'd have zero care if I have to 'download' stuff from a website and run it. The entire idea of store/aggregator is ok but the lack of choice to do as I please with the thing I own doesn't sit right.
The 5 Stages of Engineering Effectiveness
Microsoft's Junk Repo
and heavy redaction

I’ve also seen fees being used which is technically legal and is supposed to be a reasonable administrative charge but can be multiplied by the number of subjects involved for instance.
The Air Force Finally Has Its First New At-6E Wolverine Light Attack Aircraft
Yeah this should be developed more
The Launch of Databricks on Google Cloud
I'm glad that this is the prevailing sentiment in this thread. At first, the article was just run of the mill complaints about Google culture but it took a nasty turn towards the end so I came looking for validation in the comments
Scientific and technological achievement are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of policy. As I understand it, the issue really was that the Soviets believed that socialism should lead to a more scientific society, as they believed that socialism itself was based on the values of scientific progress. So defeat in the sciences was truly a blow to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire Soviet project. Not to mention that scientific advances lead directly to economic power and military superiority. I read that when Reagan announced the plan to fund the hugely expensive Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet generals, having exhausted all their financial reserves losing the space race, felt that there was no way that the Soviet economy could keep up with the military advances of the West.
Blank cheques
I agree that expecting permanent employment based on passion would be an overly-entitled attitude. But the author's complaint, that employees treat the product as "a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer", seems ridiculous in a context where an employee can be fired as soon as they're no longer useful. Why should he complain that employees look out for themselves if no one else is going to?
This is a legit startup idea I’d pay for. “De-radicalize your parents”. It gets their ad profiled and crafts a campaign highly targeted with an ever non-radical content stream.

For reals - y’all reading this now - right or wrong, this is a thing that’s needed. I have no idea what I’d pay... 50/mo? 1000 for a full campaign? But it’d be substantial.
Propaganda is a tool of persuasion. So too is fear, money, guilt, logic and everything else under the sun that may move someone's mind from one opinion to another. The outer bounds are only what is acceptable under the various rulebooks (eg laws) which today are wide open compared to yesteryear.
It's the art of persuasion via propaganda.
Or to a website - scales much better!
Notebooks – Better Tools for Designers
I think that having to make that choice in the first place is exactly what most iOS users want to avoid.
It is not. Transmission is not perfectly efficient, so location is extremely important. Hence why energy markets have varying prices in varying locations.
It isn't entitlement for consumers to look at a company saying "you can buy this game, but only on our own launcher/storefront" and say "okay, then I won't buy it". Users don't like juggling Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, and whatever other launchers/storefronts. If publishers feel the additional sales are important, they can make it available through Steam.
One recent quote from the former prime minister when Australia was planning to introduce backdoors to end-to-end encryption:

> "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"
Code Owners don't work. If you assign a team as the owner it doesn't do anything unless the team itself is also added to the project. Further it doesn't seem to properly notify people either. We've fallen back to emailing everyone manually whenever a pull request is submitted.