skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Market cap and size relative to the rest of the market.

Prior to the 2010s, Microsoft was the only tech company consistently on the list of top 10 by market cap (IBM and Intel made fleeting appearances). The top 10 used to be more diverse - telecom, healthcare/pharma, oil and gas, finance.

Now that list is absolutely dominated by tech: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and (sometimes) TSMC.[1] It's not a turn-of-the-century-style dotcom bubble either; all of these companies are highly profitable.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
> quantum communication system that would allow instantaneous information transfer over large distances.

However do they intend to accomplish that? Quantum entanglement can't be used to accelerate classical communications!
> Hard pass, I'll take a social contract defined through democracy every time.

You can't have a functioning democracy when you have militant organizations suppressing candidates who dare challenge the status quo.
Given that things like WebGL/Canvas are privacy-destroying nightmares, maybe it's time to start using stripped down browsers that leave out most of these newer anti-features.
Not every Android phone can be rooted, and a lot of people don't root even if they can. Without rooting, there's way, way more friction every time you want to install or update an app from outside the Play Store. It's better than iOS, sure, but that's not saying much.
Title is garbage and doesn't match the article. You won't be able to see an ad in the sky. This is like saying TV satellites pollute the sky with ads.

If you are outraged by this title and story, please reflect on how you consume news media.
True. Just curious how bloated everything has gotten.

Also, you mentioned the video plugin. I hadn't thought of that one - I wonder how the old video plugin vs "native" video compares (ignoring file formats, probably similar, but the new video formats probably bloat the software significantly due to all the compression).
I recommend the PBS documentary on the fed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RbL8lTsITY

Imo we need to change the social contract back to what it originally was. The fed has too much power and its been used (perhaps inadvertently) to centralize power further. There’s a reason the bank of the US was abolished back in the 1800s.

Also, I think most people forget just how diverse the U.S. is. A great example: I don’t think guns are necessarily good in the city. But in the country I need a gun because I have mountain lions and bears in the area (and county sheriffs would take an hour or more to respond). So federal gun laws don’t make a ton of sense. States don’t have the same interests (see Florida vs Washington state) nor ethos.

The way the US stayed together was each state was sovereign. Some authority was seeded to the federal government for the betterment of all. That being said, both political parties are attempting to consolidate power, and neither likes what the other wants.

Imo the premise is correct we need a new social contract, but imo we need to reinstate the one we already had.
>I know there aren't any laws there yet

I could have sworn something similar happened in the 90's (possibly early 2000?) which prompted the US government to create such a law. I'm unable to look it up right now, but a quick search may yield what I'm describing. Look for "Space Marketing Inc." or some variation thereof.
Ah, interesting. In the Netherlands it was different and there was an opposite effect, actually I moved out to support my parents.

Because my dad was dependent on the state (disability) he received a supplemental income to get his living standard to the absolute legal minimum (set at 70% of minimum wage) that all Dutch citizens have a right to regardless of circumstance.

However, the government assumes that if there's say 4 people living in one home, that they're a household that can share certain costs, e.g. rent, heating, furniture etc. This means the minimum living standard can be attained with less money, so they cut your benefits. The more adults there are, the higher the discount. As I aged from a kid to a young adult, living at home meant his income was cut.

Second, any income that the household makes (e.g. from my job), would be cut from his benefits, as we shared a household. e.g. if I earned 500 euros, he'd get 500 euros less.

This meant that to live at home, a large portion of my minimum wage earnings (parttime, next to my studies) would go simply to make up for the cuts to my dad's benefits. Minimum wage is about 1500 here, so working a 33% job would net me 0 euros as the entire 500 went to my dad who got cut from 900 to 400 due to my job.

It's a weird system that definitely is grounded in some sound logic, but also creates edge cases that aren't creating useful outcomes. It pushed me out of the house, into an expensive housing market, left my dad (who wasn't very healthy) alone in a house, that also happened to be a social home that now has empty bedrooms. It also could've pushed me to quit my job as there was no real incentive in the short-term to work, but I knew long-term it wasn't viable.
I don’t get for Cantor’s diagonalization proof, why do we need to use the diagonal digits to form the new number?

Would the proof work the same if we instead used the first digit of every number in the list?
I find that native. People with billions have more power than me on bitcoin, they can play me like a toy. cryptocurrencies aren't perfect, maybe better than fiat .. and that remains to be seen IMO, it's only 10yo.
[Eric] Seufert [a mobile analyst who writes the Mobile Dev Memo trade blog] estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much as 13.6%, according to his models.

If those figures are even near the ballpark, this would surely represent a significant blow to FB. If widely circulated, this could be wielded to some effect in a campaign by FB detractors/rivals.
And many git repository hosting services, like bitbucket, have limits on how large your repository can be. Sometimes you can upgrade these limits. This often leads to fear of exceeding this limit and can lead to one repository per module.
It's probably something like the Teams integration VMWare shipped in Horizon (in collaboration with Microsoft).

https://techzone.vmware.com/resource/microsoft-teams-optimiz...
I moved to Austin in November after 10 years in the Bay Area and a lifetime in different parts of California. Not a chance we will move back, certainly not for decades.

The most refreshing part of the change is that people are genuinely nicer and more friendly around here than anywhere I lived in California (OC, SD, SF, Berkeley, Stockton for college). I really didn’t expect that, which I think was probably due to crude stereotypes Californians like to spread about Texas. Ultimately I think the grind of just trying to live a decent life in the crowded/expensive parts of CA takes its toll on the populace.

The weather takes some adjusting, but not more than it took to adjust to the Bay Area fogginess for this SoCal native. Most of the year it’s beautiful out here.
That used to be all they did. You'd see a lot of "of course I block all ads—except Google's, they're fine".

They also didn't used to trick unsophisticated or distracted users into clicking ads by putting them inline with search results.

Both changed, I assume, when someone was allowed to run an experiment and the projected profit trend line went from "exceptionally good" to "holy shit, it's all the money in the world". And all it took was being evil. Go figure.

Some tie this to internal fallout from the the DoubleClick acquisition, which checks out pretty well timeline-wise.
After a false start called the ZZ-1, the FZ-1 was the eventual output of an R&D project called Cosmo. Isao Tomita and some of the YMO people consulted on it.

https://encyclotronic.com/synthesizers/casio/casio-cosmo-syn...

https://acreil.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/casio-cosmo-synthesi...

You could do all of this today with a VST.
I started at a new company in June and they were willing to have their lawyers change the boilerplate contract to state that anything I do that’s unrelated to our industry, done on my own time/resources is mine. It really depends on the company.
If you exclude SpaceX as an outlier, how well does this approach work? (Actual question, I'm curious.)
This comment, and the truth within it, causes me to think of Stallman.

Aside discoverability, usability and the messaging problem of selling libre software to Mom, proprietary software and walled gardens will just do this to people.

At this time in history there is not really a viable option to access the huge market of app stores with de facto monopolies of the app ecosystem aside from hoping some multinational corporation won't capriciously squash your vulnerable sapling beneath its crocs or birkenstock on its way to exercise some stock options.

The app developers are barely a blip on corporate radars, they don't see 10k users of an app as valuable at all--but this person sure does! Javier probably feels this as much as google, apple, etc would an antitrust suit. Probably more, as unlike them, he has not prepared a multi-million dollar legal defense.

Even though F-Droid is available and those apps are usable and often very good, individuals are basically beholden to this garbage!

Of course he doesn't expect to be treated fairly, this blog concludes that it is unreasonable to yank his side project app and that he has no recourse because of the way that the app ecosystem is. I don't know how these state of affairs can be improved, quickly, but I hope it is possible.
This argument is tenuous at most. Just because some companies are setting up data centers does not mean that Govt is deliberately forcing data residency to aid them.

It is ok for Europeans to insist on data residency within their shores but not for India? It is ok for Americans to insist on no data to be hosted in Chinese servers but not India?
WARN2042: The tool when compiled may have recognizable signature that raises installation of additional spyware by compromated operating systems.
> Not sure hardcore drugs should ever be OTC; cocaine[...] Possession and use should be legal.

Are you an actual cartel member lol.
TIL 255 is divisible by 17

Edit: thanks to my replies I know several more things now lol big day for me
Another benefit (imo one of the biggest ones) is not having to constantly create releases across all your repos and manage their states when jumping around during development.

My previous job used a collection of about 6 repos for different services and such, and it was a constant struggle to ensure the correct versions were used in development - especially if you were working on a bigger feature that wasn't yet released but required "future" versions from other repositories.
Not sure but everyone they asked said they would like to go back to the office. I don't think a single person said no I don't want to go back to the office full or part time. Seems biased.
Regardless of how wonderful this product may, or may not, be:

"Install chrome extension to APPLY"

No thanks.
This is a good point. But having done both...

Digital if the stream desyncs it pretty much will be out for 30-40 seconds at least for me. Then repeat every few mins. With analog while the signal was bad you could in a pinch still watch it. I knew people who watched 2nd-3rd gen VHS copies of movies at that time. They were not that picky. The color was gone and the sound worbled but they were just happy to be able to watch the movie. But if it just glitched out and died they would not have bothered. It was also they just did not know better was out there. I would show people a DVD and VHS back to back on a SD TV and they suddenly 'got it' that they had been watching snow. We look back on it now and see rubbish but at the time they were just happy to get anything.
Some good advice here. But the author sure works hard to needlessly connect it to her background in philosophy, and to Aristotle in particular.
You're still served ads though. To me it doesn't matter if the advert is relevant or not - I still have zero interest in clicking on it or pausing to read it. Little point in wasting time "marking" adverts.

For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.
These statements could leave more room for lousy artists.
> give up everything you have and leave

To nowhere, since there's nowhere else to go.
There are only 10 possible first digits of the new number, so you can't choose a number that will differ from all other numbers in the first digit. If you do it diagonally, you'll always have 9 other options to choose from, since you just have to make it different from that one number!
It is a major tech center. Probably easier to get VC money, make serendipitous connections, maybe hire talent. (Though, arguably, the advantages are less than they used to be and the disadvantages greater.)

And not weather directly but there are a fair number of tech people who, to the hiring point, have trouble imaging living other places because of some combination of weather and culture (and choice of jobs without having to maybe move to a different city in another state).
I'm super interested in this, but, every time I try this you end up losing me in the funnel. It takes too long to set everything up and I eventually lose interest and exit.
Damn straight. If all providers don't cover this it will force Biogen's hand.
Great article. Since it looks like a lot of folks are interested in this article, some extra background.

First, what is forcing? The article actually has a great description of ultrapowers (a key part of the construction) but it goes by a little fast, so you might like Tim Chow's "A beginner's guide to forcing" [1] which does a good job not only laying out the mathematical details at a high level, but also really clearly explaining the philosophy of how you prove something independent of the axioms. I found it very illuminating.

Second, the article has some interesting notes on how mathematicians go about what axioms to select and which not to. Penelope Maddy's "Believing the Axioms" [2] is the classic on this topic (it has two parts). It is focused on set theory, so it has a nice description of Martin's axiom and the arguments for and against. It was nice to read because it is a deeply technical argument (set theory is hard!) but at the same time there is no "right answer"—all of these axioms, after all, are independent of ZFC, and it's "ok" to add any of them. The arguments are sometimes aesthetic ("rules" versus "surprises"), sometimes pragmatic (what they can and cannot prove), and sometimes involve deep values of what the universe should be like (should higher cardinalities be like lower ones? weirder? simpler?).

It might all seem abstract, but if your day job is programming, imagine an argument over how to architect a large and complex system. Perhaps both architectures are possible, but which one is "right"? What arguments would you deploy? Set theorists are also building a large and complex system (the universe of sets) and are having arguments over how it should be built, which things it should make easy and which hard, which technologies should be supported natively (forcing?) and which should not.

[1] http://timothychow.net/forcing.pdf
[2] https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/belaxioms1.pdf
The decline of SF is seen as an indictment of progressivism run amok.

From a card-carrying progressive Ezra Klein:

“If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-fr...
There are also errors the conclusion is based on, suggesting the writing was not researched sufficiently.

e.g. whichever country shoots ICBMs first, destroys most of the others' ICBMs, if the target country want to make sure the attack is real. This presumes the only way to know if the attack is real is to wait for impact. Not so. ICBMs between US & Russia take about 20 to 30 minutes from launch to impact. Launch detection is near instantaneous with satellite and other measures.

The "three main reasons" are never developed.

The referenced numbers are meaningless without context. Yes, the US spends $778b in 2020, and Russia $61.7b. But, $778b is 3.7% of US GDP, while $61.7b is 4.3% of Russia's. Further example with Saudi Arabia who "only" spent $57.5b, yet it is 8.4% of their GDP. Comparing it to the percentage of government spending is even more glaring omission. US & Russia do not show up in the top 15 countries.

... and so on ... This was lazy authoring.

(Do I sound frustrated? Yes, yes, I am.)

My data ref (and matches author's): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
Network effect, online isn't the same.
Yeah otherwise laws don't mean anything, right? It's free-for-all. From "stopping at a Red light is optional" to Vigilanteism. Can you explain how that would work? Would you want to live in that kind of state?
So are ULA, Lockheed, Boeing and other dinosaur OldSpace giants.

Rather than pork going to aerospace contractors working on an already obsolete or soon to be obsolete SLS, I rather that that states get money to work on whatever made possible by the Starship program.
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.

This is very common on HN these days - stating something with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-constructed mental model that has nothing to do with reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.

Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements. You want more proof? Look at all the companies that went public on the back of Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.
Find a Chess Buddy to Play with in Brooklyn, New York
The bay during the 2010s was a very special time and place. Hard to understand if you weren't there. I've never felt a sense of community and energy and excitement like that anywhere else. Not to mention all the free pizza and beer. If COVID is over and that world comes back, I'd love to return. But right now there doesn't seem to be much point.
If you are curious about the trajectory that the first orbital launch might follow, have a look at this article:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/13/spacex-outlines-plans-...

They are aiming to fly Starship over the Straits of Florida (i.e. between Florida and Cuba) which means it will be low inclination. I assume that this is to avoid overflying inhabited area 'early' into the flight and especially not for too long, a trajectory bit further to the south would e.g. mean that they had to fly over the full length of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I would expect them to be "out of the woods" already at this point in the flight though. The next critical part would be reentry north-west of Hawaii.
I would like for you to reread my comment. The second paragraph. Not OTC per-say. Instead of using a stick governments need to use a carrot.
Everything you are saying makes good sense, but I wanted to ask: Is taking a computer program and then re-configuring for some exotic and complex CPU a great problem for AI?

I bet people on this forum know why that is / isn't true and I am curious.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. It's great to see that you tested out the probabilistic planning mode enough to identify ideas like this that would further enhance it. In fact, some of these things like being able to inject "simulated recessions" are already in my feature backlog, kind of waiting to see how much demand there might be. I'm definitely looking to keep evolving the tool over time, and I'll put some thought into how to accommodate custom tax brackets (seems pretty doable), as well as the other probabilistic features you mention.
I think this quote from the beginning of the article is instructive:

> We need new social contracts or we’re headed for some nasty conditions.

> And we believe it’s up to tech Founders, VC’s and employees to do something about it.

"Tech people, please build something that pacifies the masses, or they might rise up and take our money!"
100% agree, tact does not require dishonesty. At the same time, honesty does not require saying everything you think to everyone within earshot. Brutal honesty: Your eyebrows look awful shaved off. Tact : Those eyebrows are very unique. Dishonesty : Your eyebrows look great shaved off.
That's exactly what James Damore is.
The Curse of Communicating Complexity
Communication is a staple of human endeavor. Knowledge is nothing if not shared with others or packaged to the world in one way or another. Inventions and businesses are ways knowledge is combined and shared with the world.

The Transatlantic telegraph cable - also known as the Victorian Internet - is regarded as the most powerful force behind globalization because of the way it enabled communication and information sharing between worlds. The modern internet has advanced that. Communication sets us apart.

But as the amount of information shared increases, so does the possibility that a message is garbled. This is known as the Curse of Communicating complexity. And is a result of cognitive load.

As ideas and context mix, communication gets more complicated and things are lost in translation.

People tune out to complexity. System 1 is the default option for our brain. It’s how we can survive the endless stream of information. If it gets too hard for the fast and intuitive system 1 to process, the message is garbled. As the modern Internet brings all this information within clicking distance, communicative patterns need to evolve to cope with short attention spans.

Face-to-Face Interaction is the biggest tool for reducing this curse, and it’s why content being created and shared needs to adapt to that same pattern. The best communication is simple and Interactive. Like talking to a friend.

The biggest winners of our vast information-sharing world are those that can reduce the cognitive load for most people. Communicate complex ideas in simple ways.
There are many factors that come into this. The bandwidth of a single analog channel can accommodate 4 or more digital channels. If the transmitter is not upgraded, its power will now be spread to multiple channels.

Another is simply self-selection bias. When a rapid technical transition takes place, the average reception might improve significantly, but you can't guarantee it for everyone. A slight frequency change, a reflection pattern can drastically alter the signal intensity in a certain spot. But you will only hear from people who happened to have good analog and lost it, those with bad analog had already moved to cable and are unaware that good terrestrial digital has become available.

My experience with Freeview in the greater London area was very positive, with a very simple antenna I was able to get around 100 channels, the vast majority in perfect quality.
+1

Everything comes at a cost, if people cannot profit from it. In this case, looks like protecting Amazon is not making a profit. Then someone must pay the cost.
This is tantamount to saying that every degree-holding MechE should do all of their car maintenance and home improvement and design their own products. Genuine passion for engineering and a healthy dash of imposter syndrome impel me to handle as much of this as I can, but I don't hold it against others who don't.
N-GATE is great satire. Reading it de-pressurizes me after a week of Hacker News.

And I love N-GATE's "ABOUT" link, which reminds me of a sinking ship (am I on-board?, are we ALL on-board? What's going on?8-)):

http://n-gate.com/about/
Pocho the Crocodile