skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago I had thought that an acquisition of this nature was obviously coming sooner or later, but the pool of potential buyers got thinner as Discord gained more and more of their own leverage and influence. At this point I don't think Discord needs to exit in this way, but it still might be a very appealing option.

If the deal ends up occurring, I'd have to bet it is with either Microsoft or Facebook, both contingent on antitrust (although I feel like they'd be hard on FB here, but not MS, for whatever reason, likely due to media influence). Although other contenders could theoretically include Google or Amazon, it's a bit harder to imagine. Tencent is already a minor investor as well, but selling to a Chinese company would be particularly rough (Same for ByteDance). For these reasons I'd bet on Microsoft, not that my bet matters in the slightest.

Additionally, a lot of Discord users have just keenly realized who it is that actually holds power over their favorite platform, including a large slice of their online social life and a plethora of personal information, from every character they have typed in a direct message to every click they have made in the app, and it is certain not the users themselves. But, at least the "We will not sell your data" clause will have been technically correct (the best kind of correct, of course).
> That may be my pan-European bias

Or in other words: The excuse for being aggressivly nationalistic towards other nations, without the need to call it nationalism.

This behaviour is particulary present across European high-educated middle- and upper-class circles and in general in Germany. In short: in areas of a society which have trouble celebrating their roots, because it grounds them. Next to their lower class neighbours or distant un-urban relatives.

> While UK officials and media repeatedly demonized the EU for the past ~5 years.

From following the three elections regarding Brexit (the Referendum, the EU parliamentary vote and the British Election in 2019): to claim that a majority of the British media, politicians and business elites sturred the anti-EU sentiment is utter, utter nonsense.

The vast majority of domestic political parties favours the EU soley for the fact, that it gives them twice the amount of taxpayer payed positions they could shuffle their members into. And so did most of the British parties.
> Clearly auto-updating works in some contexts, but not in others, and now we can all learn from it :)

I think the point was that we all knew auto-updating doesn't make sense in the context of developer tools. I'd even argue GitHub Desktop shouldn't be auto-updating. As a matter of fact, VSCode doesn't, and my compilers certainly don't.
"Float to the top, or sink to the bottom. Everything else in the middle is the churn." - Amos Burton.
Isn't this the same place everywhere that has a meritocratic system? In Japan/South Korea it's the final test at high school, in Switzerland it's the 1st year of university, etc.

I prefer the system in Switzerland, because everyone gets a shot at studying in the university but only those who can pass the exams can continue studying. Of course it means that the entire university experience is high pressure but it's more meritocratic, since different high schools have different standards for a good grade.
You could even go back another step and recognize that the person you're replying to has made completely unsubstantiated and fabricated claims about:

1. An increase in violence targeted specifically at Asian people that is in excess of the already-documented rise of violence in general experienced across all groups in 2020.

2. An attribution that this imaginary excess violence is "white supremacist" in nature and intent.

3. A direct causal connection between this imaginary and poorly-attributed violence stemming specifically from the origin of the virus.

It's easier to defend freedom to hypothesize when you realize that the people advocating against said freedom are, themselves, simply making shit up.
> Starting around 1975

Guess what happened in October 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act
Former Stanford IT employee here.

I don't doubt it.

There was one department where the manager was hiding piles laptops in a disused shower.

My boss was stealing equipment for personal use, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The university wasted $150 million on consulting and software development on a system that never worked.

Waste there is rife because there is very little fine-grain budgetary and expenses auditing. And, the university has so much money, they would happily throw money at problems and not get too concerned with waste because that might make someone look bad, draw attention, or require effort.
RMS came to speak at my university. He probably did more damage to general student perception of anything associated with the FSF than industry-ass-kissing professors did in the 3 years prior in that one day. Thus if you want the ideas to succeed, you want to make them matter independently of the "brands" of RMS and FSF, especially now the FSF has decided it wants to continue to tie its "brand" to RMS going forward.

("brand" in quotes because it's not quite what we usually mean with that term, but I can't think of a better English word right now)
Please do not post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
It's not obvious it was conscious. It's an endemic problem in British business culture, and there are obvious rewards for conforming.

People who do "growth" and "strategy" invariably seem to believe they're worth the big money, even if they're actually harming their organisations and lowering their effectiveness and survival prospects.

If they're as good as they think they are they should have no trouble selling their innovation elsewhere.
dang, do you think the fact that this is announcing a date in the future to look out for potentially an exploitable issue and folks may want to discuss ways to mitigate that?

granted, much of the discussion is not about that at this point, though there is a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547279
That doesn't surprise me. I look up answers to questions and definitions of words using google and seldom click through because I get what I need in the results. Not sure that's 2/3 of my usage of Google but that may not be far off.
Well, the Also I'm going to move this into the roadmap, as it's a feature request not a bug. is just as bad. If the process broke my desktop then it is a bug.
It's my impression that the vaccination program in Denmark is very efficient just like in the UK. However, the speed is limited by the vaccine imports which are governed by deals made by the EU. I would think that Norway is similarly limited by imports. (They are not in the EU so probably are making deals at a national level.)
Lipids for the Pfizer vaccine are manufactured in the UK. A total EU export ban would have elicited a response nobody would have liked.
Nethack 3.6.6 Webtiles Server
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship mostly lists uses that don’t have a real market right now:

- Reusable launch system
- Intercontinental transport
- Space tourism
- Earth–lunar transport
- Mars colonization
- Multiplanetary transport

The only thing with an existing market in that list is “launch system”. They’ll have to develop the market for 100 ton launches, though (100 tons is 20% of the mass of the ISS)

Because of that, I would say starship still has to prove it is commercially viable.

Space tourism, in particular, highly depends on how safe one can make the trip. A 1:1000 risk of death likely would make many would-be passengers think twice before booking a trip.

It also would depend on making the trip nice. The first few tourists might go for bragging rights, but after that, one would need attractions in space. Building those there will increase the cost of a trip.
The EU don't own the vaccines, it's so much more complicated than that.
The WHO investigation DID NOT eliminate this theory. From what I remember, while the WHO was investigating, one member said "it didn't come from a lab". Then when everyone returned to their home country, some members suggested that it was possible - and I don't think their official report opined on it coming from a lab.
> The fire was caused by plating equipment in one of the buildings due to a surge in current,

https://www.eetimes.com/fire-destroys-part-of-renesas-fab/
The EU has received enough vaccine for everyone over 70-something. But it doesn't change anything about whether there's a third wave or not.

If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
Weird that you talk about "making shit up" when your post contains no cites.
It's disappointing that there'll be basically no real consequence for this for anyone involved.

They got 70% over 4 years, this Haworth got 30% in the last year.

They're just rotating one group of people who leeched out their worth to replace them with some others who will do the same.
I wrote a bash script that handles everything for me, from setting up the base operating system, from installing packages, to configuring them. The script can configure my laptop, my wife's laptop, my media centre, and our Android phones, although on the phone's case, you cannot do nearly enough with adb.

Once it is done, it saves the generated credentials to my 1Password account, restarts my computer, update firmware if needed, and we are ready to go. People love to crap on bash, but meh, it never let me down.
https://www.krispykreme.com/promos/vaccineoffer
I think a lot of sentiment on management side boils down to confirmation bias. Employee morale is big part of a managers job, but only truely caring managers will admit if they are failing. In my experience most managers will minimize, highlight only successes, or out right lie to save face.
No, nothing has really changed. It's an opinion article that's basically saying since lab accidents happened elsewhere, a lab accident could have happened in Wuhan. No smoking gun here.
What's the rationale for doubling the first price ? Why is it a more fair price ?
The earliest cases has no known link to the wet market. That's an old hypothesis.
I like the way you phrased this. Very in line with my thinking on this.
Buying is a near perfectly good investment (sadly). Selling is almost the only way to lose money in real estate.
Wowww: https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io/issues/6910#issue...

What the hell does "Docker's new direction to go back to its roots and focus on developer tooling" even mean? Docker is developer tooling, that's the whole product. That's not "going back to your roots" that's just doing your damn job.
Most excellent! We use Uwsgi in production with Django. I have often wondered why it isn’t more known. There’s support for many runtimes and features for larger scale. Only thing that’s hard is setting up configuration for your use case. Perhaps with Picu one could package best practices for various tech stacks. Then just serve the apps with ease. I’ll definitely take a look.

Thank you also for the k3s setup. Testing K8s apps locally and developing my own is far easier than in the cloud. Like making Picu work from within container and publishing apps under managed K8s. Without having to deal with kube things individually.
> Then this PR was filed. Invalid user input should not be classed as undefined behavior and concluding that the standard library's UTF decoder shouldn't be used if you want a safe execution is just absurd.

Just to copy Andrew's final words in here:

> I think the entire std.unicode needs an audit both in terms of API design and performance. This module is not yet what it will become before stabilization. But this commit is not where this is going.

The PR wanted to make a function that takes runtime values only take comptime values. I read Andrew's response as saying "this all needs to be looked at before 1.0 but this isn't the way to fix this", which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable thing to reject a PR with.
But what if they attack, or otherwise more subtly take control of Taiwan, and the fabs are not destroyed. I'm sure that would be their preference.
Leaving aside the politics is anyone surprised that roll-out has been slower when organised (to a material extent) by a multinational organisation whose normal modus operandi is to build consensus amongst its members even if this takes time (I've experienced it at first hand).

Contrast this with the UK which has a very centralised governance model and a centralised single payer health system.

Not being critical of or praising either model or behaviour in either case. Just not surprising that this happens when the challenge is to deliver on a clear objective as rapidly as possible.

(And still disappointing that EU citizens have to deal with the results of this).
The web was already polluted. GDPR only removed the facade and now you see the ugliness that was behind it.
Browsers have the benefit of massive interest in their beta releases. This substantially reduces the number of breaking changes which make it into auto-updated versions.

Perhaps Docker could learn from this and only auto-update to versions which have been used by a large audience for N weeks with no regression reports.
Seems like you've got a bit of reverse surviorship bias here.

You don't notice all the updates that are flawless.
Look over to the snap store on Ubuntu, and it's hard to stop updates there too, they just update when they want.
Dupont is also simply a French last name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_(surname)#:~:text=Dupon....
The end of special treatment for AMP pages
Apparently the Pangolin thing is looking less likely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
This is how you get forked. They're risking the business on some dumb dark pattern here.
Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth.

No source of covid-19 has been found.

Similar lab leaks happen frequently.

BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused of being a racist. But if you say South African or British variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest people aren't thinking critically about it you will be accused of flamebaiting or trolling. If you call out people who are trying to silence your comments you'll be accused of "making boring reading".

I think it should be discussed, debated and seriously considered. There is a suggestion in here to assume both the animal farm and the lab were the cause and to respond appropriately. With lack of further evidence I think this is the best idea.
Pangolins were an early suspect, but Alina Chan discovered that the multiple pangolin papers were all from the same batch of smuggled pangolins. This makes it much more likely that the pangolins were infected by something else, in the same way that housecats get infected by their human owners.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1....

Because of this, Nature has placed an editor's note on their pangolin paper:

> 11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x

No one is seriously proposing pangolins anymore, not even Daszak and the Chinese. The proximal host for MERS (camels) was identified in a little over a year, and for the original SARS (palm civets) in a little less. For SARS-CoV-2, despite the much greater effort, we're still waiting.
But still, we’re not sure that the content will be free of external influence taking advantage of the writer’s reputation.

Obviously if they peddle too many interested articles they'll likely get caught, but if they do it once in a while or take payment from opposing interests, etc., who’ll know the difference?
Bank of America: ‘Bitcoin's dirty little secrets’ – full report
The business side of things - very difficult to pull off, I agree. The pure technical side of things? I honestly could replicate within 3 months of full time work and I’m sure a fair few others could.

Thing is in theory, SaaS / Cloud should be win-win due to specialization. However the pricing I have seen is anything but - they need to charge that to support the sky high valuations and funding rounds. Which is why most scramble to do vendor lock in because without a barrier to entry they will need to keep reducing their prices down the equilibrium level that others can charge and have normal (but not abnormally high) economic profits.

To give you an example, I was quoted 12,000$ per year for an enterprise b2b database solution to record questionnaire answers. Great software, meeting a need we have. But I’m building a basic postgresql database and a very basic web front end for free in its place. 80% of the functionality, 0% of the cost.

I admit the remaining last 20% is the most complex and hardest part; also marketing and all the business aspect is a whole another game. So I have no intentions trying to compete with them, I respect them but at the same time I can’t justify to my company to spend 12,000$ per year for something that an in-house solution can cover most of. Even my CEO said - isn’t that just a database?

This case doesn’t apply generally, but there should be enough examples of SaaS that can be replicated and we don’t need to pay an inordinate fee to use. I would place substack firmly in this list - it is a mailing list software with a text editor (I wouldn’t be surprised if they just reused TinyMCE for this).

Most of the examples you have are very advanced software and I agree with you that having them readily available for all companies is a net positive. Perhaps sales force could be replicated, the rest require serious programming chops and investment.

I basically agree with you but want to share a few more data points on uncommon cases to show the angle I’m coming from. My belief is substack is in this set of uncommon cases.
I still call them Berg connectors, but I am an old fart.
A former co-worker wrote a saga about trying to use modules in today’s Java ecosystem: https://www.theoryofgeek.com/articles/fomo-java-module-editi...

TL;DR: anyone doing it wrong anywhere breaks you, and it’s only a win if you feel a need to rip pieces out of your JVM.
There should be a class of jobs for retirees just working for health care and socialization.
As a technical user, how often is the HTML content actually useful to the content of the message? For some anecdata, I'm a heavy user of Mutt, and I get my HTML mails piped through w3m --dump for display.. I might have to invoke a web browser on the content once every few months?
Agree. "I was just following a successful model" is not the right way to approach engineering, without understanding the trade-offs and it seems that step was missed when implementing it in the first place.
If there are "so many dangerous terrorists" worthy of trillions of dollars of military spending to protect me (I'm in the US, but all governments invoke terrorism as justification), why aren't those terrorists utilizing viral weapons like this person describes? Is there something that could stop this kind of threat, if it is as real as described?
> most people should own their homes since most people are living in the same place for extended periods of time. The exceptions to that are rare and need consideration

I'd be very curious to know what kind of exceptions you mean.

I've owned where I live a few times, each time it ended poorly. Now, I rent. The problem is, I can't buy what I want to live in even if I wanted to buy. Here's what I want to buy:

- Inside the city limits of Seattle; location is not fungible, I can't substitute a property in Spokane or Atlanta for one in Seattle.

- Within a 10-minute walk to a train station or rapid bus route.

- An outdoor space of my own, not a shared garden but a balcony or private garden of some sort.

That's it. That's the Tweet.

You'd think that would be trivially easy, but the exactly two places I've seen where property can be owned (one is a townhouse development in Rainier Valley with an astoundingly expensive HOA, yet still sold out and the other is a condominium development near the stadiums but the handful of units with a balcony sold out immediately) are unavailable.

There's nowhere else. No condos, no townhouses, no rowhouses, not even any detached houses. It's all rented apartments. No one is building ownable properties, because of a combination of striving for rental returns, zoning, and Washington's condo liability law.
> but learning to correctly use the Go language to reliably build correct programs is much more difficult

I feel this strongly as someone who prefers to write code which always works versus the "works except on edge cases" approach of most Go code. It's a step up from bash though.
> We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.

No, we need to shame China and the Chinese people until they respect basic human dignity. Until they do, the country and its people are a dangerous, malignant threat to our civilized, Western world.
Ironically, that’s largely due to the EU being a bit too free market. The EU is almost the only country/bloc to allow unrestricted export of covid vaccine; indeed, it even exports to other vaccine producers. India was also a large exporter but seems to be tightening up. This is, broadly, a good thing; if it had taken the same approach as the US and UK then supply in many countries would be virtually zero.

So far attempts to deviate from this haven’t really gone anywhere (though there’s currently talk about halting export to other major producers, primarily the UK. I’ll be somewhat surprised if this happens; the UK is so small relative to Europe that an extra ten million doses or so may not be worth the acrimony).
but there was a spike in pneumonia related cases... didn't a doctor sound the alarm on this (and was reprimanded for it)
Outside noteworthy scummy politicians and a few partisan media outlets. I really haven't seen much in the way of MSM doing that.
HN has plenty of people who feel strongly on both sides of this issue. In my experience there are many more on your side than the other (probably by an order of magnitude)—certainly the number of times I've had to moderate comments breaking the site guidelines on China-related topics is over 10x lopsided, and no we're not looking to moderate one side more than the other. (Just the unpleasantness of being accused of ugly prejudice from every conceivable angle is enough to make one scrupulous to the point of paranoia about this.)

Each side is utterly convinced that the other side dominates the site and is sinisterly manipulating/astroturfing the community. None of these feelings is based on any reality that I've ever been able to observe. It's all imagination driven by emotion. When it comes to this topic, the main impression I gets from trying to keep this place in some semblance of guidelines-respecting order is one of mass-psychological, tribally motivated insanity.
It's the chance for a lot of kids to chance to get out of the hood and change their entire family's fortune. It's a competitive world.