skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think he was trying to imply that coding was the only thing that's complicated.

I think it comes back to "No Silver Bullet" and what it has to say about accidental and essential difficulties.

There may be impurities in water, yes, and it can be several temperatures, but water is water is water. It's still chemically two hydrogen atoms connected to a single oxygen. We can define what pure water is. Having that definition allows us to define tolerances for how much "not-water" is in the water. What kind of pipe is necessary to deal with the not-water, etc. The essential difficulties of plumbing and water management are never really about the water, it's about how to deal with not-water.

Same with electricity, the way it moves may be differing, but it's still just electrons. There's no special electricity that will conduct through rubber. Again, we can define what electricity is. And again, having those definitions, we've moved our essential difficulties to the not-electricity part of the problem.

There is no standard "data". We cannot define what data is. Because it kind of is everything. It's a nebulous, abstract concept. It doesn't mean anything on its own. What we really want to do is process subsets of that data. And filtering to that subset is the essential difficulty. And then you have the issue that two consumers of data could want similar data, but not quite. So data's essentially difficulties come sooner and once you've transformed your data into water, you still have more essential difficulties to handle.
Making money on trades within a month doesn't tell you whether you know what you're doing. It only tells you if you're lucky.

We should not be encouraging day trading. A better test would be if you put the money in non-penny/non-meme stocks and didn't touch it for the remainder of the month.
> And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the net since the mid-90s

There are other factors like IP reputation of the email server sending the email. And if you’re using a hosted service, there’s no way to control those IP addresses.
> Yes, I'd say that summarizes my statement well, where Marx's definition of progress is moving a society towards communism.

Thanks for the explanation!

> This is why any time you see somebody talk about "the right side of history" that's a flag that said person is a Marxist, they view their desired communist end-state as inevitable.

I think that is, at best, a gross generalization. Just because that is what a Marxist might say, does not mean that everyone who says that is actually a Marxist. Besides, I believe that "history is the story of human progress" is much more a modernist theory, than a Marxist one. It seems to me that someone being "on the right side of history" could just as easily mean, being part of the progress which modernists consider inevitable. Hence making it a modernist sentiment.

Besides, when someone says "the right side of history" all that suggests to me is "back then people thought X was acceptable, now we no longer think that. Person Y was against X, and hence 'on the right side of history' ". The idea that our current morals are better than our previous morals is rather unsurprising. Most people probably hold that opinion, because otherwise, our current morals would change.
An email migration was that important that they decided to shake up quite a bit of the exec team? Or was the email migration stuff just internal politics playing out in the news?
> Could you explain why this is sub-optimal? It's sub-optimal because of the added risk?

Suppose my cost of capital is 5%. My current business (selling widget A) is returning 20%. Great, my ROCE is 20%. Now let's say I can't expand my current product line any further. I can only sell so many widget A's.

But supposing I invent a new widget, widget B. Its return on capital is, say 10%. Should I manufacture widget B? The answer is: yes. My cost of capital is still 5%, but I'm earning a 10% return on it.

So the value of my business has increased. My overall ROCE will go down, though, because they'll now be a mix of sales at 20% ROCE and some at 10% ROCE. But even though my ROCE has decreased, it is still a good idea for me to produce widget B.

It may "look" bad to investors that my ROCE is going down, but I'm actually producing value for them. That's why I say that ROCE maximisation is sup-optimal. If I scrap widget B, them I'm actually doing investors a disservice.

I'm assuming "all things being equal", like risk profile.

In practise, they of course won't be. Companies could play a short-term game, like IBM seems to have done, by outsourcing to India, or whatnot. Sure, in the short term, ROCE has increased, but in the long term people will get cheesed off by their poor service.

It can work they other way, too. Take, for example, Kraft vs Nestle. Let's call it the "American" model vs the "European" model ;). Kraft took over UK chocolate manufacturer Cadbury's a few years ago now. They cut costs and produced something that consumers didn't like so much. In some ways I guess they had to, considering the amount of dough they blew on the acquisition.

Nestle, OTOH, tried to sell their stuff in Africa. That required a lot of money spread over a long period of time, because Africa has poor infrastructure. But what it meant was, when things got going, they were in a position to sell products to Africa when others weren't.

It's a long game vs a short game. Of course, just because it's a long game doesn't necessarily imply it's better.

But you can see that "hitting next quarter's targets" is apt to produce disappointing results over the longer term.

As regards FB buying Instagram, I have no sage advice. I could never see what the fuss was about with FB anyway, but they're making plenty of money, so I make plenty of mistakes.

Big companies often trot out phrases like "synergy" and "strategic acquisitions". They might work, they might not. Statistically speaking, odds are against acquisitions. Companies generally overpay for what they believe is exciting stuff, only to have the whole thing be a huge financial fiasco. Just ask Yahoo. They did alright with Alibaba, though. As another example, take Google's acquisition of YouTube. As far as I'm aware, they never made a profit out of it.
> Which words in that statement are contemptuous?

Not so much words, but the attitude it displays. It lies and stretches the truth to make it look like these companies are behaving irrationally and destructively and that Amazon is the good guy who cares.

It shows contempt for those companies, and contempt for the listener (because they expect us to believe it)
I have a soft spot for The Register.
Reading BOFH from time to time for light relief...
Well if all you wanted to know was the truth the video title has it right there (chopped off from HN title) - M1 Mac SSD Wear Issue Tested and Explored. Yes, it's a problem.

I have YT Premium so without ads I found the video to be informative albeit a little slow paced. He goes through debunking various theories including the smart data being incorrect or misinterpreted.
The benefits of visual programming are usually that it captures the domain model better than using general programming languages without any guidance. Lot of the value is in well maintained integrations to other systems. Often, if the components of the visual language were released as a library or a framework, it would provide more benefit than having to drag and drop visual boxes and arrows which don't ever make it to version control or in some very clunky way.

Releasing the composable parts as text based library will not happen, because of economics. There is little money in creating libraries for the creators. All generated value would be captured by infrastructure, cloud platform providers.

With visual languages, the value can be captured by selling a no-code idea to non-programming folks and especially to enterprise with deep pockets wishing to get rid of expensive engineers.

Visual programming languages are an economical problem, not a technical one.
I agree completely. If the IRS want an easier time, we should simplify the tax code, not give them more resources for enforcement.
Oh wow :) Do you know, by any chance, what type of filter/firewall your institution is using? I'd be interested in the reasoning behind the flagging/blocking. C.
> They have invested a ton of R&D into the hardware and they’re cautiously developing a tablet UI from the ground up.

They’ve meticulously developed a tablet UX, where multitouch, pointer and keyboard-based interactions are treated as first class citizens.
> And rather than trying to extend it to everybody, they're demanding that it continue to be extended just to them.

Cite proof of this, this is exaggeration at best or more accurately a complete falsehood.

> Turns out that in a lot of ways it's a privilege nobody should have. Some opinions are hurtful, and people don't want to associate with those who hold them. It's a hell of a privilege to ask for the ability to say absolutely anything you want -- even if it hurts other people -- without consequences to you.

Certain opinions deemed "Hurtful" include, we should have right to fair trial, we shouldn't discriminate based on race, we shouldn't bring back book burning, and sins of the father is archaic and ridiculous.
Yeah, Postgres off the top of my head does NoSQL (JSONB), graph and time series stuff either natively or through some cheap or freely available add ons. It really can do anything. It’s not gonna be the best at that non-relational stuff, but it will do a “good enough” job for most use cases until you introduce heavy scaling.
Sure the government has gotten it wrong in the past. But this time we need more government because the right guys are in charge and it will work better this time. Promise.
While this is currently in alpha, this has tremendous potential as it makes Vue even more "progressive" framework by giving ability to downsize to 5kb when necessary.
For those who want to get their hands dirty, here is a full, step by step tutorial to set up your own email server: https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-ma...

migadu's mail number limit does not make sense to me: This risks losing emails.
The most common example of this would probably be complaining about advertising whilst working for a business that depends on advertising to survive.

Ultimately it's a kind of Kafkaesque trap that modern living has us all in to a larger or lesser extent.
The Teamsters represent employees, individuals that is. Not small companies.
Does someone offer a comprehensive "Patent it yourself" course?

This would be very useful, not necessarily to actually write patents but rather to truly understand the subject. It could save entrepreneurs time and money and, yes, some could actually use the knowledge to write their own patents.

Patents are very expensive. The small entrepreneur often has to choose between protecting IP and having cash to run the business. Spending $15K to $25K on a patent is out of the question for most small businesses. In that context, the idea of writing multiple patents is nothing less than fantasy.

Such a course, if well done, could easily be worth a few thousand dollars. It would also help equalize the disparity of IP "power" between large corporations and the little guy. When someone has the financials to write hundreds of patents per year, while the other side can barely (financially) approach one every five years, that creates a serious asymmetry that is hard to resolve.
and obnoxiously cringe. He is the only techtuber that interview Apple employees and only one side at a time can be seen. LOL.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...

Normal people joined the internet and they want normal people things.

The internet is almost like real life now. Communication has consequences in real life, as kindergartners find out.
Isn’t this the YouTube way now however? Most videos are around 10 minutes or longer because that’s what YT thinks drives engagement, and therefore adverts? I’m sure there was something about videos over 10 minutes getting preferential placements in search results etc..
I told a friend that I wanted to be an "influencer for the 3M corporation" because I do a lot of projects with adhesives; he told me I should start the 4M corporation... I might just settle for being Paste-Pot Pete.
>who even uses bitmap graphics any more when there's VectorDrawable

A lot, I would bet. Can you even 9-slice a VectorDrawable?
What is the reason for this? Is there something about M1 that requires lots of data to be written/read from disk? If no, can we not expect that Apple will fix this with a software update?
Use case: I have an unattended cron task polling my IMAP account to archive the mail every 4 hours. I specifically use an IMAP read-only unique ("per-app") password for that script/connection; under no circumstance should that password have access to write to IMAP, touch POP or SMTP. Fastmail allows me to do this with ease, and I can create as many as I'd like with different ACLs. The mxroute reasoning simply does not consider all the use cases people have and want per-app passwords for to increase their personal security posture.
FundOSS × Textpattern CMS: Thank You
I remember the book that came with Coherent 4.x. It was great! I already knew C, but learned a ton of POSIX / Unix-specific stuff from that book.
A picture of uniformed North Korean toadies standing around Kim Jong Un comes to mind, all with their notebook and pen at the ready, smiling and hanging on every word.
This comment is incredible on so many levels.
We're gonna Dropbox this thing all the way to the top!
Makes sense. That's probably the best interpretation here. Any other decision would make attribution lists optional in general for all practical purposes.
"Nevermind We're Actually Evil Now"
If a standardized test said "what is the Yiddish word for rag?", is that test fair? It asks everyone the same question after all. But I'd bet you find that Jewish people were passing that test at a higher rate than anyone else.

Obviously the biases in actual standardized tests are more subtle, but a lot of the question have an inherent cultural bias and assume some basic cultural knowledge in their test takers.
That's a good point. I think part of it (at least in tech) is due to the fact that big tech companies focused on hiring the best people from all over the world, which reduces even more the chances of local unfavored minorities. I'm from France and stories of people going to the USA to work at companies like that are common. I don't think I would feel underrepresented as a French if I worked at Google or Facebook or an equivalent. This allows the USA to do a brain drain of global talent, which helps a lot at being the best in the world. On the other hand, that means that the local people are compared against a global market, which makes things harder from them.
The radical progressive left is effectively the mainstream these days; the NYT is one of many high profile representatives of its beliefs.
"Whereas scientists would face backlash "

Bingo. It's usually not a good idea to expect groups to self police themselves - Doctors, Lawyers, Judges - they rarely hold themselves as accountable as outsiders.

The real issue for this in my mind - why the hell is this stuff still gatekeeping Before the internet journals made sense as a way to distribute content effectively - but content distribution is either a solved problem or should be a solved problem. Journals are relics that should die - need a scientific wiki or similar model to replace the journal concept.

Right now it's just a good 'ol boys club, like most professional organizations. Inject some external pressure and you will see the dynamics change.
Climate change will not be the "destruction of humanity". In fact, over the next billion years humanity will have to get capable of living with large scale climate changes anyway, so this is good test case on how we deal with it - especially on short-term vs long-term trade-offs.

The way investors and financial institutions are salivating over the revenues from transition and sustainable finance, I'd say it will be expensive for most us but it won't lack financing to do things.
Your read of the situation is truly bizarre. Yes, the system is broken. That's not the IRS's fault. They have no power to fix it.

And complaining about the system being broken because you make a mistake and it had consequences, and because you have to pay taxes on a large income in order to pay for the costs of operating a modern society, is just whining.
Record Runner – smallest portable record player
I've thought along those lines as well. I don't know if this helps clarify, but I did learn, for example, FedEx is actually quite strong without Amazon: "Last year [2018], Amazon accounted for 1.3 percent of FedEx’s total revenue." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/business/fedex-amazon-shi...
The claim for AI systems like this is that it has actually learned something and is generating code from scratch. Oftentimes the authors will claim regurgitation is simply not possible, and this example shows that's a lie.

Many arguments on the benefits, legality and power of AI systems rely on this claim.

To turn around now and say it's OK to regurgitate in the right setting is to move the goalposts.
> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!

I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc.

The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?
"it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be."

This is because the online audience is much larger than it used to be. I could say something on usenet in 1994 and the reach was pretty limited.

To be clear, stating unpopular opinions has always been dangerous if the wrong people hear them. Now its just that they're much more likely to hear it online.
> soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's, which within a lifetime has produced multiple generations of nihilistic bureaucrats trained to seek power for its own sake

buckles seatbelt

More like produced generations of social warriors who push critical theory and oppressor/oppressed dynamics wherever they can to disrupt society much like what has been happening visibly in the US for the past 15 years.

The globalist media corps of today are literally doing this to a T with their viewership in lock step with Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", wedging and destroying any semblance of unified culture in the US in the name of ...social justice? Does anyone here really think these multinationals or their political operatives give a single f*ck about whether we have due oversight into our secretive branches of govt or tangible social equity and mobility in the US?

Soviet infiltration is a boogeyman, but if anyone wants to read about actual university infiltration, much of it can be credited to academics from the Frankfurt School who immigrated post-WW2 - Marcuse, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Adorno - individuals that set and grew awareness of an ideological framework that is actively dismantling cultures and societies all over the Western world.
Wow. I quote directly from the article and get downvoted.
> Capitalism demands relentless and permanent profit

No it doesn't. Plenty of companies go years without making profit.
> This is not really helicopter money in that sense, you’re not giving out unallocated free money, you’re just doing cash flow relief.

That's if you're only looking at the repayment stage of the loan in isolation. The way loans work is that:

1. you get money upfront in exchange for nothing

2. you pay it back

If you take out the second step ("cash flow relief"), then all you have left is "you get money upfront in exchange for nothing" which is the definition of helicopter money.
Ask HN: How to Avoid Cloudflare Single Point of Failure
Yesterday Cloudflare experienced a mini outage due to some maintenance on their data centers. On their status page they report this as "Increased HTTP 522 Errors in Osaka Japan region" but it seemed to primarily affect servers located in DigitalOcean's NYC data centers [1].

As I was working on mitigating the issue it wasn't readily apparent to me that there was a way to avoid having a SPOF on Cloudflare. In my opinion, Cloudflare is good technology but this is perhaps the second time in 30 days that they've affected production for me in the middle of the night with no apparent recourse. Even if we were to disable Cloudflare's "orange cloud", I believe it could take some time for browsers to clear their DNS cache.

Does anyone at HN use Cloudflare but not rely on their infrastructure? Or have some other way of handling Cloudflare issues?

[1] Online Reports:

https://twitter.com/sgtfrankieboy/status/1410899013247942657
https://twitter.com/markdunbavan/status/1410898361536888832
https://twitter.com/brettemeyer/status/1410899733929938947
https://twitter.com/ThomasArdal/status/1410899770315509761
https://twitter.com/soulphones/status/1410901523685589003
https://twitter.com/DOStatus/status/1410903554227908609
> If I can’t upload my own signing keys to be trusted, it’s as good as useless to me.

I personally haven't seen a computer yet that doesn't allow this. Even if it's not provided the option to disable secure-boot is still available.

Phones are the real problem. As far as I can find only the Pixel phones will allow secure boot with a custom OS. If you own another phone you're already locked in to your manufacturers keys or no keys.
What is ARR? It’s not as simple as you think
Large scale chia plotter here. I've used over 20 different brands of SSDs; you could say I "stress-test" NVMes for a living.

The "TBW warrantied" claims are not so meaningful. On every single NVMe, I have gotten at least 2-4x the rated TBW warrantied without encountering ANY issues, whatsoever.

The NVMe spec classifies the rating as being able to retain data, powered off, for 1 year. If your macbook is connected to power more than once in a year, you wouldn't expect to lose data. So real ratings are higher than claimed in the video.

I'd expect the Mac's NVMes to work for 4-8 years of heavy usage, before failure.
I hate self-promotion but it seems like a necessity. We've spent a lot of time on Voyage and we think it's pretty great but I'd love to hear your feedback.

Some of my favorite features include:
* easily deploying web apps with multi-repos and multi-services
* migrate and seed dB's for each deploy preview
* built-in feedback tools with each deploy which helps us get rid of damn spreadsheets.
Aka the Wells Fargo Fuck Yourself model.
What do people wear on scientific basis in Antarctica?
In my experience, it is more they "share" spam documents with you.
Yes, People Can Die from Giving Up on Life
What does one of Russia’s opposition parties have to do with the state of the media in the US?
Do a search for [why is I don't see color racist]. Much smarter people than I have written a lot about this.
I agree with your extension/modification.

I do have some doubts that there are high numbers of these cases, given how much overall excess demand there is for qualified candidates. It is surely possible and worthy of examination, though.