skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remove startups that burn through literally billions of dollars of unlimited VC money... and how many flourishing startups do you have left in the US?

BTW here's a look at Y Combinator's bestest startups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27485360 (full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27482589)
I've often wondered about taking this one step further: rather than using the terminal to render ersatz graphics, building a plain-text based, conversational operating system. Something like a generalization of ed[0], not just for editing but for doing every other task, but with a more verbose English syntax rather than line noise.

You could even do conversational tree editing, e.g.:

Current node: function definition `fibonacci` with one parameter.

>rt

The return type is `int`.

>body

Current node: an `if` statement.

>condition

The condition is: n <= 2.

>replace <= with <

The condition is: n < 2. No type errors.

>build and test

Build complete. 100% tests pass.

Or something like an interactive fiction/text adventure[1] type thing, where you move through a virtual memory palace by typing e.g. "go east", "go up", and perform operations on data by using verbs like take, search, look up, etc.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
If you remember something in your brain, you have recorded it. Electronic records are only different in scale/capability and guaranteed perfect recall.
How often are you going into shock from heat?!?
You are not weird. A lot of people think it is the best RS book. Different people value different things .. differently. Personally I can't go past the bad writing in The Prefect, but world building is still top notch as the rest of RS.
False. https://enforcementtracker.com
Eonza: Automate Tasks on Your Computer
It depends on your experience. For me it didn't require much time at all. You might also consider it a valuable learning experience so worth making the time. I would highly recommend being on top of your own home network as you really never know when networking skills will come in handy.
yes it is, thanks - I must have misread the description

I know a lot of Grudgers
Come on. I wish ADA well, but Charles is one self-centered person and the community has erected a cult around him and is super toxic against other projects. After BTC maxis, ADA has the most religious maximalists I would say.
> No one removed digital privacy in EU.

Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world. The EU currently has tenuous protections that are in danger of being superceded by concerns that are perceived as higher precedence. The article does seem to be doing a reasonable job of highlighting one such process and sets it in context with the bigger issue.

> The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members [...]

Just because a political opinion has almost no supporters doesn't mean it's wrong. Historically, privacy alarmists got it right more often than not. None of the scenarios outlined in the article seem particularly over the top to me.

> Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it.

I don't know this person, if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it. But being against data retention seems a reasonably stance in my opinion.

> If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each of them the lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop.

I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas. But the debacle behind the upload filter / copyright directives has shown to me that those agendas either don't include digital rights (in which case they apparently default to deferring to industry lobbyists) or their agendas are not particularly well aligned with citizens' interests.
The reality is that people sit together and try to make a deal that all parties agree on simply because disruption and uncertainty is not in the interests of any of the parties. This doesn't change the fact that the parties do not have aligned interests and therefore its a constant fight everything is slow and expensive because of that.

Kinda funny how this problem was solved before ETH even existed simply by removing the incentive for the hardware operator. No block rewards and no fees to collect aka no reason to fight over it. The only people who run the hardware without getting paid for it are the people who want to use it. They have aligned interest like a fast and cheap network and fast update cycles. And ofc no one who has to pay for the hardware and energy has any interest in PoW.
I’m currently reading this book and the author attempts to expose the control structures exerted by big tech on individuals, and the effects on people’s rights and lives. It pulls together a few subjects often discussed separately such as right to repair, limiting choice, surveillance etc.

Thought it would be worth sharing wider
Hard fork to what? Gpu PoW? That doesn't work in an adverse environment, considering it would start from zero (gpu mining is almost going to disappear after mining eth ends). In fact existing asic miners could easily rent enough gpus just to kill the new fork by not allowing any transactions.

In fact when LukeJr made a threat of a PoW fork during the segwit activation drama, Chinese miners said they secured enough gpus to kill the fork when it starts.
The current vaccines + some minor measures probably wouldn't be enough. It's quite plausible that the Delta variant spreads as effectively in a fully vaccinated population as the original variant did in an entirely unvaccinated one, and you can probably remember what it took to get that somewhat under control. The UK does to have relatively stable case and infection numbers without major official restrictions, but we have a lot of natural immunity and large voluntary reductions in the level of social interaction, plus it's summer here.
- I’m staying on iOS 14 for as long as I can.

- I disabled iCloud and iCloud photos.

- For now doing encrypted backups to iTunes on my pc.

- I’ve also started using Cryptee and they seem solid. Link below. I’m also curious to see how cryptee develops.
https://crypt.ee/
I find this pretty insulting to the average persons intelligence and out of touch with the pricing realities in many locations.

I have two local grocery stores. One is in town and the other the next over. Both are less than 3 miles. The prices are between 2-4x compared to me driving 30 miles in either direction to visit Cost Co/Walmart.

I don’t mind paying more for local or the convenience but I quite literally can’t afford to more than double my grocery budget for the month. So I only buy perishables locally for the most part.

The economics of this are problematic in both directions, but I still need to put food on the table.
That may be true, but the same could also be said about plumbing.
I wanted to comment on the same statement. At a minimum all those companies share with law enforcement and national security to some extent. Beyond that I've heard of data sharing agreements and some kinds of data sales at more than one of the FAANGs, and can't see why they would stop, though I can definitely see why they might be two-faced about it and try to give that impression.
Maybe the issue is that the symbols we readily accept are the ones we grew up with when learning Mathematics, + - * / ^ % = ..

If 'reduce' and 'map' had widely used symbols, which were taught in school / university as part of the standard curriculum, how different would coding look today?
> Yeah this is what bothers me too.

Yet you fell for government propaganda and report the fault on people who don't want to take part in clinical trial. The restriction of liberty with a vaccinal passport is purely a political choice and has nothing with health per se. A lot of countries are doing fine without it.
> 2021: Gang violence increases in Europe,

What are you referring to here?
Traveling, communication, rights - everything is a degraded experience because of 9/11 and the governments have made it a habit.

Obviously, Terrorists have won. I don't know how aware the American public is, but Afghanistan is being overrun by Taliban as we speak, causing another refugee crisis in Turkey that could easily spill into the continental Europe and the UK. Just before the pandemic, the Turkish govt was blackmailing EU with letting the refugees go wherever they want, you can expect this to repeat as the Turkish public is overwhelmingly against(polls show %80 want the refugees go) hosting refugees as many as %10 of its population. EU almost went bust with only 1M, Turkey alone hosts 5M to 8M at the moment and the Afghans are arriving in thousands everyday.

You can expect the governments to try to manage the situation by increasing their toolset. You can expect increased surveillance and decreased rights trend to continue. You can expect people with different aspirations to try to take advantage of it.
Serious questions- does this resolve anything about tether? Can we trust this auditor? Are paper quality holdings detailed enough? Can they claim some crap Chinese paper is A2 or better?
I’m quite certain tether WAS a scam in the beginning but it seems very possible they made so much money that they were able to “fake it til you make it”.
I won't accept your "to be fair", since it shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Just heavily regulated.
Civilization would never have happened if it depended only on "most people" or animals.

Greedy VCs/companies don't deserve to reap the benefits of civilization.
In google source code: https://cs.android.com/search?q=%22wtf%22%20f:java$&ss=andro...
In fact, GDPR is only 3 years old. Let’s put timeline of the past 10 years. Has privacy increased or decreased?
>this has been addressed several times here on HN in the past and it's still false

Can you debunk (some of) the specific claims made in the article?
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I have seen organisation where platform teams build tools, frameworks and nobody uses them. Few places where it makes sense is when an organisation is large and has corporate and regulatory policies that applications and people have to adhere to.

As platform team member, you really have to know what to build, doing interviews, figuring out what developers and SREs really want, filter through what they are asking for, control through not-invented here syndrome, make build-vs-buy decision, create the community around the product you build within the organisation etc. You cannot just start building a PaaS (most common thing I have seen them build). It is actually quite complex if done right. Having said that, lot of organisation the definition is quite vague, political too and sometimes the boundaries are not clear.
Ontario man's forgotten email password resulted in a $6,255 Quarantine Act fine
> 108MP sensors becoming increasingly common

Do millions of tiny binned pixels provide better image quality compared to much larger pixels with the same sensor area? How do they compare in low light?
Also it is (and was) the only English speaking country in the eurozone.

Tax was a huge factor in drawing some of the big names but the double-Irish (the worst aspect of tax avoidance) had been phased out. Corporate tax is 12.5% which is lower than the majority of EU countries [1] but the existing ecosystem of companies has also helped create an attractive labour pool. If it's purely tax everyone would move to Hungary (9%).

1: https://taxfoundation.org/2021-corporate-tax-rates-in-europe...
>There are plenty of things we allow the state to do that we wouldn't allow companies to also do.

That's why it's a bit hypocritical on their part.

GDPR was about EU citizens rights and privacy. In fact they uphold public institutions to these standards, and have issued fines.
I think the comment was referring to Dublin
Also the police harassment of FriendlyJordies, where the deputy premier of NSW fabricated allegations to get the counter-terrorism police to arrest a journalist. Scary. Nascent police state vibes and few people care.
Huh, I always thought these worked in reverse of what the article explains.

> First, as air is caught by the opening of a wind catcher, it is funneled down to the dwelling below, depositing any sand or debris at the foot of the tower. Then the air flows throughout the interior of the building, sometimes over subterranean pools of water for further cooling. Eventually, warmed air will rise and leave the building through another tower or opening, aided by the pressure within the building.

I thought that the wind at higher altitude passing through these tower openings causes a low pressure zone in the tower, which draws cooler air up from the basement/subterannean pool/qanat, through the building and out the tower. The pool or qanat is also open to the air at ground level further away from the main building, so that indrawn air has some time to dump heat into the underground/water.
Not recording the conversation would be something akin a no-log session, or the view-once message they already have.

Semantically here it's like the self destruct message they send in Impossible Mission but with a very long timer, it's a new primitive I'm not used to handled yet.

A garbage-collector for your memories like I am inviting the Langoliers into my phone.
EU should not allow migrants, it should be the Arab countries that should take them.

Swedish cities are now plagued by massive problems due to the large influx of migrants.

Another wave would destroy any hope of returning to normality in Sweden.
Let's be real, I have trouble trusting people who use the words ‘tortured phrases’ instead of ‘bogus sentences’.
Anyone find a Parsec-like tool that supports Linux as a session host?
I really enjoyed this and felt it resonates quite a lot with my own views.

I think a lot about there not being a "right" or "wrong" approach, absolutely, rather approaches which work for some teams and individuals that don't succeed for others.

As well as being too easily distracted by shiny new tech toys, our industry's other big dysfunction is a ready insistence by "thought leaders" about how to do things right, the One True Way.
We're all making money, house prices are up, how good is that?
"We asked 100 people who were interested enough to write to their MEP about digital privacy and 80% of them said digital privacy was important"

People who are motivated enough to know and comment about these proposals are not a representitive sample of the population.

If you were to stand outside Old Trafford and ask people who the best football team in the UK is, you'll get the vast majority saying Manchester United. Do the same thing in London and you'll get people saying it's Arsenal. Aside from both being wrong, you can see the bias.

Accredited polling companies adjust results to minimise sample bias, but even then have to be careful to avoid leading questions as shown in this 'documentary':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
It's possible, but if you have a lot of knowledge, I think he'd welcome the connection. It's also incredibly flattering if you can ask intelligent questions or give intelligent appreciation about their papers. How else do you know your stiff is being read?

Have a look at Exercise 3 of https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-615/homework/hw5.pd... . Internalizing this advice has been life-changing for me.

> Edit: btw, I thought I had met Armando so I just checked and we were both at the Dagstuhl conference on Inductive Programming (yet another byword for program synthesis) in 2018. I don't think we talked much but we were introduced and he gave a short talk. Small world!

Cool!
Of course it is not less code, but that additional code is mostly declarative documentation in the form of function signatures. You'd have to hold it in your head anyways to understand the original code, but now it is stated explicitly.
The alternative to provide that information in a single big code blob would have to be code comments.

And there are chances you wouldn't have to keep the function implementaions in your head, if they were extracted reasonably. Do you need to keep the details of how `sort` is implemented to be able to understand what it does?
Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
I thought the SV of Europe was generally thought to be Berlin?
The researchers did the comparison in their control datasets.

There is a significant and detectable difference between generated garbage and failed translation.

Speaking of which, just out of curiosity I tried and translated one of their examples to simplified Chinese and back into English using Google translate. The results were shockingly bad, but until I discovered that it was the virtual line breaks introduced by the UI (i.e. the textbox) that caused it.

Turns out it's a horrible idea to introduce line breaks in the middle of Chinese character sequences as the meaning of individual symbols varies depending on adjacent symbols. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of translation mistakes stem from that horrible design decision.
How Your Phone REALLY Spies On You
In what way did vaccines directly cause the virus to mutate to the Delta variant?
>>Obviously, Terrorists have won.

Speaking specifically of 9/11, no, not really. Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit such a crime on American soil that every average American will have to look up Al Queda, find out why they attacked America, and in the process discover all the attrocities comitted by American military and then finally and hopefully turn against their own government.

Obviously, none of the above happened - American government used the attacks as a pretext to spend another trillion dollars on a pointless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and then used them again at home to remove private liberties and introduce laws that would have had no chance otherwise. I'd argue the average American never bothered looking up why US was attacked beyond a "brown people hate freedom brrrrrrrrrr" nonsense.

So no, terrorists didn't win. They failed at their stated goals miserably, but the world's population still lost as the noose of global surveilence is getting tighter and tighter every year.
In February of 2000, Newsweek ran a cover stating: "Stockholm: Hot IPOs and Cool Clubs in Europe's Internet Capital". This was at the apex of the dot-com boom. Swedish economy was boosted by the success of Ericsson and the explosion of mobile phone connectivity around the world. One of the articles from that issue is here: https://www.newsweek.com/shining-stockholm-162345

Quote: "How did Sweden get so young, hot--and competitive? Deep technological roots and some recent bright blossoms have helped. Communication has long been crucial in Sweden, with a small population (today 8.9 million people, barely more than Greater London) spread across an often-inhospitable land mass a little larger than California. Swedes loved the telephone when it was new (Stockholm in 1900 had more phones than London or Berlin), and they took to wireless phones and the Internet with equal enthusiasm. Education and a commercial mind-set are factors too. Because of their relative isolation, Swedes look abroad for ideas and opportunities. For generations they have learned English, now the language of the Internet--and they've done so in a lavishly funded state education system that also places a high value on science and engineering."

This is the same period as the "staff PC" programs were running, where you got tax-deductions for personal computers as is stated in the reuters article (".. government policy to put a computer in every home"). So while these seeds were sown here, they had not yet born fruit to cause the the Newsweek cover of that era.

If Sweden is the Silicon Valley of Europe, which I personally doubt, it is at least something that has been in the making for 40 years or more.
Heatwaves cause deaths and increased hospitalization at least in Europe. I presume it's not any better elsewhere.
Letter to a Young Employee
Unless you also have the means to manufacture your own end-user devices that have feature parity with Apple devices, there is no practical way to replace MacOS. Getting non-Apple OEMs to ship your OS with their PCs is probably not happening but at least in the realm of being conceivable.
My personal list of causes for why Sweden indeed is doing incredibly good when it comes to tech these days:

- Early broadband investments and subsidized PCs (as stated in the article).

- Good e-government and digital infrastructure, which means little bureaucracy for starting and running a company, but also availability of out of the box tools to build complex products. Example is bankID, an ubiquitous digital ID solution which startups can us for instant customer identification that lives up to all legal requirements.

- Early success in building global tech brands (Skype, Spotify, even Pirate Bay), which laid the foundation for a self-reinforcing ecosystem (self image, newly minted angel investors, media attention etc.)

- Generally a positive attitude towards tech among the population. Unlike in large parts of continental Europe, being a pessimists/naysayer about new things doesn't give you a lot of status in large parts of Swedish society. Being an early-adopter does.

- Hands off regulation. Not necessarily by virtue, but rather as an accidental side effect of Swedish (political) and administrative culture. Sweden is culturally and politically pretty bad at preparing for negative outcomes. "We have been naive" and "we didn't see it coming" are frequently heard statements from politicians about negative societal developments. For the tech sector, this is great, since startups can try new things without too much early interference by the state or bureaucrats (example: Unlike in many/if not most other European countries, rental e-scooters have been introduced with almost no regulation. Regulation is only now happening, after issues became apparent).
Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance, and many are perfect for anonymity (Monero).

Tor is open-source and can be audited for government backdoors.
We are pretty aware of what’s going on in Afghanistan. It’s been on the front page of every major news site for the last however many weeks.

But I’m not sure why. Are they trying to make me think that leaving Afghanistan is bad for America? I think it’s good. Time to stop spending money there. Trump and Biden are right to leave.

Surprising that even media outlets like the NYT seem to be writing doom and gloom about leaving. Biden just not be making globalists very happy with this.