skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a kid I sure thought it was!

We had one of the first houses in the Eugene (OR) subdivision where I grew up. The next lot up the hill had just had the trees cut down, so us neighborhood kids made tunnels through the fallen trees. We called it "the rough country" and had picnics under the branches.

If we walked another block or two up the hill, we were out in the uncut forest where we could explore everywhere, collect wild mushrooms and pine cones and what have you.

The lot just down the hill from ours had a house under construction, complete with a bomb shelter! Of course, this being the late 1950s, we had two main worries: getting blown up in a nuclear war, or polio.

But we'd gotten vaccinated, so the nuclear bomb was our biggest concern. We spent a lot of time in the bomb shelter, brought cookies and snacks, and conducted our neighborhood business meetings there.
Surely they’ll figure something out on the way.
Google should buy Discord. Now. I hope they don't though.
The Current Status and Challenges of China Railway Express (CRE)
> What's "naïve" is you or anyone else thinking they have the power to "nudge people into better patterns"
> You can't, and you never will. Culture evolves slowly, and humans even slower.

There is ample evidence since at least World War I, that both 'positive' PSA type information and 'negative' propaganda/counter information/psy ops absolutely have an effect.

Reminder that the Wakefield fraud in 1998, on M.M.R. vaccines and autism, started a negative sentiment towards vaccination and is directly attributed to the measles outbreaks (and deaths) across the developed world (Amplified by Oprah's platform). [1]

Reminder that still today many people will claim carrots give you better vision (they are indeed healthy). This was a counter-info operation from the British, claiming they were providing Air Control with carrots, in order to hide the existing of newly invented RADAR technology against German Bombers. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...
I worked at a big technology company earlier this century which had sabbaticals at the 5 year mark. It ended the program because too many people would quit at the end of the sabbatical.
Pompeo was there for the signing ceremony, I’m wondering about this quote from leap day 2020:

> “I’ll be meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not-too-distant future, and will be very much hoping that they will be doing what they say,” the president said.
> change is its weapon of monopoly

I think it's OK for Google to make Chrome into an OS and cram whatever they want into it as fast as they can.

Regular web browsers don't necessarily need to be on the same feature treadmill/death march (assuming they could keep up.)

We seem to be trying really hard to reinvent the applet systems of the 1990s, but in a way that brings systems with 10-100x the memory and CPU resources to their knees and requires huge armies of programmers to implement. I guess JavaScript/webasm is better than Java in some ways.
If you can't self-host a web-based application you have no capability of ever using it without third-party tracking

It's at least possible (albeit potentially difficult) for a native application, should it have have such tracking, to have that tracking removed. Software "crackers" have shown, time and again, that so long as the code is present on a machine it can be made to run in whatever manner is desired.
A message to web developers, from a screen reader user
This is why I ordered one.

My skill set is strictly front-end with enough back-end chops to get by. I’ve never made a game but I’ve no shortage of ideas.
Well, it should not be that big of a challenge to leave it out from one's resume. Especially if you are studying at the same time so there would be no gap in the CV.
As another former Facebook employee, I mostly agree with this.

One nitpick is that although you may have not looked at the holdouts often, somebody definitely did. Different teams use their holdouts differently, but leadership probably looked at your holdouts at least a few times per quarter. And now with recent infra and changes, it's very likely that data scientists or product managers somewhere in your org are responsible for explaining results to higher ups at least quarterly.

All that is to say, the cause isn't that Facebook (and Netflix) aren't thinking about or monitoring things in the long term. It's that they are measuring the wrong things, because it's very hard to measure things like "this is clickbait".
You can put down whatever number you want for all of the variables in your formula. It's the auditor's job to make sure that a) they add up and b) they are correct.
YES, it is called the "Bar Association".

That's why lawyers and doctors live in fine houses and drive fancy cars. They don't give away for free the knowledge that they worked hard to attain over a decade or more.
> i do not understand snapchat and their business model.

Ads[1]. Initially it was just promotional lenses/filters and required a high touch process and substantial media spend commitment. But looking at that site, they now have a full on self-service ad platform with minimal spend commitment, helper software to make lenses/filters, and have added several other ad formats beyond that one.

So they've essentially monetized the same way as every other "free" platform has – capitalize on all the eyeballs they have to siphon off a cut of marketing dollars for themselves.

[1] https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/
Gpg for file encryption is easy to use.

The difficulty that people refer to is about key management that holds for any program, and email encryption, that involves setting up an email client, a plug-in, getting the other side to use encryption, etc. This didn’t scale well, because the average user wants a zero click solution.

The average user (and some times those familiar with technology) hasn’t heard of Thunderbird and doesn’t want to set that up. They have a short password and use web browsers.
All web applications may be spyware, but using web technologies as a common format for specifying a UI had benefit, even if it's not through something as heavy as electron.

Having an interface I can just stand up on a port and access locally through multiple different browser options, or even expose to remote if the user wants, and it will be the same across every OS for zero additional shipped library cost, and works in every programming language, is an amazing thing.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I have heard developers dismiss normalization as a theoretical concern. It’s not. Normalizing prevents update anomalies, for one thing. That’s not the same as “data corruption.”

In my experience most software developers don’t spend years studying theory. They spend hours studying buzzwords and fads.
Desalination can provide for a lot more, even then, consumer usage is nothing compared to agricultural and industrial use.
Depends on the change and effect size, also on product. Typically somewhere between 1 week and 1 quarter. Almost always there is a backtest after shipping in which a small percent of users do not receive the change for 1-6 months (a "holdout")
But many of those startups didn't fail! They were shut down despite having many users and may have been profitable as a startup. If hangouts was a startup, it would be more valuable than slack or discord. Instead it got shut down and replaced by a far inferior product.
I'm a developer as well and for me I'd say the most effective way to reach your audience is to cold mail them about your product and services. Cold mailing them in a way that's not spammy and instead makes them what to know more and reach back out to you.
And don't just limit yourself to cold mailing, if you don't know someone's email, you can hit them up on insta or twitter for cold DM's, but again you need to be careful of what you say and how long your messages. Chances are they get a lot of similar messages, so you need to act quick in a short message while still attracting them to your concept
I'd be surprised if PMs didn't get promoted on "product launched", "new market entered", and such thing as well. If engineers get promoted on new service launched, new major feature launch, massive rewrite, etc. I'd bet PMs would similarly be promoted on the same, so big feature launch, big new product launch, big new market expansion, etc.

That makes it they're all spending their time pitching these ideas left and right to the execs until one bites.
I'm of the opposite opinion. They're executing their vision perfectly.

Netflix is very aggressively pursuing the bottom line, and they're not doing it differently from a drug dealer. It's not random that the term "Netflix binge" exists.

Netflix interface is designed to shove content at the users' face at all costs, and in a very disrespectful way. Here there are some disgusting dark patterns:

- it took them a long time to give the user the option to remove movies from the watching now list

- there's no way to remove already watched movies from the panel; their trailer is even sometimes displayed in the top frame

- they randomize the global order of the horizontal lists, so that one needs every time to hunt the user list (watching now/my list) through all the panel

For a short time, I even experienced a bug where movies with (my) negative rating were not greyed out. I can imagine the engineering thinking "LOW PRIORITY!".

On my (fictional) "drug-dealing practices" rating, Netflix is high on top with Amazon.
Uber also had a private entitlement https://www.techspot.com/news/71289-apple-granted-uber-ios-a...

As well as Hulu https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/06/apple-hulu-special-api-...
It's new upper managers throwing out their predecessor's work to mark their territory with a fresh start. Messaging app users are not the customer so normal business rules of engagement do not apply.
Thanks!

> how does firebase fit into your stack?

The usage is quite minimal, mostly for authentication and storing basic CRUD data. All of the real-time data flies through the servers mostly without being persisted. Firebase indeed gets quite expensive at scale. I'm cheap at heart so I avoid it when I can.

> how many concurrent websocket connections are you able to support per server?

That is a very good question. Nevertheless, I don't think that concurrent WebSocket connections are the bottleneck at the moment. Audio/video and game physics seem to be the biggest drain on the CPU usage which means before I'd get to max WebSocket connections, the machine would be overloaded before.

I did however have a problem though with throughput of a Socket.io server. A basic setup of Socket.io runs on a single thread which means it's easy to clog your event loop when you have a lot of concurrent guests in the same room. I managed to workaround this one quite well with a bunch of hacks - from packet sizes to designing features in a more networking-friendly way.
14 Tips for Great Copywriting
Short and sharp, hope you all enjoy.

1/ Speak their language, not yours

If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, let them see themselves in your words. Let them trust you because the words are their own.

2/ Focus on benefits

Emphasise the benefit to the reader, not features.

Eugene Schwartz said, “Talk about what your product ‘does’, not ‘is’ - and demonstrate this.”

3/ Less is more

Give a clear, concise message, nothing more.

“Write to the chimpanzee brain - simply and directly.” - Eugene Schwartz

4/ Get their heads nodding

Ask questions in your copy that get your reader answering yes.

If they say yes once, they’re likely to say it again, and again, and again.

Once their heads are nodding, they’re hooked.

5/ Appeal to emotion.

What is your reader’s deepest desire? If you can capitalise on that, you’ll have a valuable customer.

The strongest, deepest emotions, not governed by rational thought, are:

- Greed
- Guilt
- Exclusivity
- Fear
- Anger
- Salvation
- Flattery

6/ Avoid ’weasel words’

Fill your audience with confidence, not doubt. Avoiding commanding words is a way to protect yourself, your reader will recognise that.

Replace may, hope, could, with will, can, do.

7/ You, You, We

Use the word ‘you’ at least twice as much as ‘we’.

If you speak about your prospect, you’ll naturally focus on their needs.

8/ Make it look good

Don’t waste well-written copy with poor aesthetic.

Make it appealing.
- Short paragraphs
- Variety in the text (italicising, bullet points, headings)
- Images and vibrant colours

9/ Use numbers

Numbers drive credibility.

Confidence isn’t enough to win over skeptics; give them reliable data.

10/ Focus on one point

If you have something important to say, say it over and over again.

Richard Perry says, “Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.”

11/ Relax.

Successful copy is personal and relaxed.

Don’t bother with formal language - just imagine you’re having a one-on-one conversation with your reader.

12/ Tell a story

Stories make you memorable.

13/ Snowball your reader

Every sentence should lead into the next.

And the next,

And the next.

Turn your copy into a snowball.

14/ Be funny

Nothing is more personal than humour.

You don’t need your reader in stitches - just let them know you’re a real person too.

--
You made it!

Hopefully it was helpful. I originally wrote an extended version for the newsletter of a new project I'm working on.

If you're interested in getting more marketing tips and tricks, check out upskillmarketing.org

Cheers,
Connor.
Why are those discussions silly?

He has an incredible amount of influence but he at times has for example insane conspiracy theorists on with absolutely zero considerations about how him "appearing" like a good friend to them will influence his audience. He always ponders to his guests, which makes sure that they trust him and open up.

That might appear to be a good thing but it becomes a problem when you have people with insanely irrational and unscientific ideas on and don't put up disclaimers about their redderick. I'm not saying "cancel him", but I can totally understand why Spotify would want to remove some episodes...

Personally I think it's sad, because he does have the conversational and interview skills to really get a lot of information out of his guests but he let his platform become a stage for insanity.
No, no. Single politics course, they do exists, but never single Maoism course, single Dengism course, etc. Even in colleges and universities they're combined into one single course. This time it's different, China is having single Xi-ism course.
Yeah, it's interesting to see the original 1948 publications. My uni library had a set but for some reason the covers were a reddy-brown color. All my Dover reprints are softcover and had new designs on the front.

Even now, decades after I first encountered it, I find the scope and breadth of this Rad Lab series quite mindboggling. What was achieved by Fredrick Terman, Vannevar Bush et al between 1941-45 was truly remarkable. Shame the series isn't better known these days as it documents a true milestone in engineering history.
Deep Learning with PyTorch - https://pytorch.org/assets/deep-learning/Deep-Learning-with-...
A related article from Nikkei Asia: Pandemic turns 'Iron Silk Road' into China-Europe trade artery[1]

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Belt-and-Road/Pandemic-tur...
That is a very broad statement. What specifically do you find terrible?

Here is a list of issues I often have with JS-based alternatives that do not exist with alert/confirm/onbeforeunload:

- the escape key does not close the modal
- tab focus is not restricted to the modal
- the modal is not properly announced by screen readers
- the positions of confirm and cancel buttons differ across sites, leading to misclicks
- the modal is not or very hard to use on mobile

Building good modal dialogs is hard and much easier done in the browser than on the page. Even <dialog> (if it ever becomes a reality) will not solve all of these issues reliably.

So in a way I agree with you: there might be more user friendly solutions. But the average alternative that people come up with will be worse, not better.
For me, since I'm a solo developer, I use a combination of Trello, notion and even just plain note pad.

Trello helps you get an overview of the stages your projects are at.

Notion helps you plan them out.

And note pads and sticky notes are good for writing out and testing new things that might be good but aren't as important
Can I reiterate that you should ask HN admins to delete this post in its entirety? Highlighting from the reasons I linked above about why public message boards are a bad place for legal assistance --

> *If there are actual or threatened legal proceedings, anything posted on this website may potentially be used in evidence against a person.*

At the very least, tell the lawyer you end up hiring that you posted this. They would really, really want to know.
While I understand your attempts to make yourself look younger, I really find this cruel to a degree. No body should pretend to be something they are not, just for a job.

As some one who is in late 30s, I fail to understand why any young person should make fun of old people.

What do these young people plan to do about their own age? To prevent aging do they plan to die early?
I believe, also local IP address, as a machine may have multiple network interfaces with different IP addresses. At least it's something that I've read being used for a demo of simultaneous one million network connections.
Can confirm. I've been woken in the night a fair few times from someone half way across the world writing @all in a channel discussion...
This is not true. LibreOffice is being ported to the web, for example

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM
Ask HN: How do I connect to Hacker News API?
I'm a student and I would like to query HN data, I tried to connect firebase API without any success. I would be happy to some advice.
Thanks in advance
These cloud providers are not “simply rent resources” cloud providers and have not been for a very long time. Their play is to reel in businesses, and then offer to make their life easier by integration with their platform specific services, and then they are locked-in.

Think about it as an enterprise that has built their stuff with EC2, S3, IAM, Route53, RDS, Cloudfront etc. Would any sane IT architect say - Let’s find the technical equivalent of each of those, and rewrite all our automation and management scripts to those, and hope that they all work. All for that sweet 10% cost difference with the new cloud vendor! ?

The big guys of the cloud are winning at imposing lock-in ecosystems on businesses.

Source: I have worked at infrastructure engineering capacity at two companies that went the way of the cloud, one with AWS and the other with Azure. I’d say it took about a couple of days before they used some component of infrastructure that was cloud platform specific. From then on, all engineers assume “oh we are a AWS shop” or “Oh we are an Azure shop”.
Sometimes a team should just collectively say "No" to a PM. And not in a "you are a moron"-way, but in a "this is not how it is done in the trade"-way.

Bonus points when you build him a excel exporter for github issues.
Icymi – The Taxation of Cryptocurrency
Virtual Transactions Bring Real-Life Tax Implications
> You are a name caller.

No, he's not. He's calling out antivax nonsense from an "I'm not an antivaxxer but".

> There are downsides to getting the vaccine.

Sure.

> I know people who were down and out with side effects to the vaccine for a week.

That's widely documented [0], no need to share anecdotal data.

> If this is accurate, then people who had covid are 18x protected vs those vaccinated.

The paper says 13x (though 95% CI goes up to 8-21x), where's your 18x coming from? The most protected group is, unsurprisingly, infected and single dose vaccinated (6-7x over just infected). It's also important to notice these multipliers have a different meaning when talking about rates: 95% vs 99% is 5x, yet both are excellent

Now since you seem to dig immunity from infection vs immunity from the vaccine, it would only be honest to compare side effects from both of them [1] and their relative cost, and the global cost for everybody else: roughly $30 for vaccination vs ~$6000 [2] times 13 days [3] = ~$78,000 per ICU stay on average (and that's 2005 dollars as per [2]).

I only see rational hesitancy towards <12 year old population. For the rest, mRNA vaccines are better than waiting for the bug to catch you on literally all metrics, often with multiple orders of magnitude.

> Maybe we should introduce a covid card and only let those with them into restaurants.

Not sure only letting 12% of the population into restaurants is gonna help the sector antivaxxers are so worried about.

> After all, it is likely that the combination of the reopening and breakthrough caused the spike.

It's just the reopening despite the vaccination. If anything, vaccinated people feeling overconfident about their immunity during the reopening played a role.

[0] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavir...

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/long-term...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7800750_Daily_cost_...

[3] https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...
>A school has existed since 1868 yet people move near it and think they should have the final say on what the school does

The university I went to has existed since 1388, one of the first universities in the Holy Roman Empire if I remember correctly, and yet it still answers to public authority when it comes to land use. That seems pretty normal to me, no such thing as academiocracy
...in primates...
We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines.

Could you please not create accounts to do that with? We're trying for a different sort of website.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Last time I heard this only affected chrome. So if you want ad blocking, just use a different browser.

Kinda obvious that the browser you get from the ad company for free is not for you if you do not like ads.
Netflix has literally zero discoverability if you want to go outside what it suggests. If I click stuff that initially seem appealing and then based on seeing decide I dont like it, tough luck. You clicked on it, because you liked name and pic, turned out different thing that you like, but now netflix is forever convinced you want this.

I tried to go through documentaries category, because I was in mood for documentary. Pure hell and every time I viewed movie detail, it jumped back to start.

I dont have an option to click on something else and Netflix does everything possible in order to prevent me to find stuff I would like. The result is that I dont idle watch netflix, because it is too much work and we watch only shows someone else told us about and we searched by name.
> he good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.

This is good news.
Isn't that the whole problem of ocean acidification that everyone is intended on avoiding? Sounds like you would just accelerate the problem by moving CO2 from Air to ocean water.
You seem to be talking from a position of ignorance at least when it comes to Jolla and Sailfish OS. The former is probably the best non-mainstream mobile OS that can be used today.
Since he moved to Spotify the number of guests that interest me has dropped. Not sure if his move to Houston precipitated that.

One of the few recent times I've tuned in was the other day with Lex who I tend to listen to more often as his guests are way more interesting.

And Spotify's recommendation engine sucks for podcasting, most of the time it only suggests ones I've already listened to.
There are apparently at least two people claiming to be Zynga CTO in 2011-2012: https://mobile.twitter.com/om/status/1291146438265602048
Put some JS on the host and use postMessage()