skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." - Paul Morphy.

I started playing anonymous games on LiChess, and playing without ELO anxiety is way, way more fun. It's a game, this is all I need out of it.
This depends on the org, but an org that insists on putting me through a timed algo test isn't a place I care to work for.
Seems pretty cool, but:

* i don't see a demo, it'd be nice

* is it US specific? seems like it is from the descriptions, but I'm not sure
Isn't that how fundraising works? You make people commit to "supporting your cause" with a trivial pledge, so that when you ask for actual money they can't back out without losing face.

"I will maybe log off at some point" sounds like maybe too weak a pledge to me, but I'm sure they've focus grouped the shit out this.
> The developer experience with an interpreter is fantastic,

By the way, there are some (high-level) compiled languages with REPLs like Lisp, Haskell and Elixir.
well, what do you expect if they lie about almost everything.

The "Fake news" phenomenon is very real.
> California had a capacity-related blackout lasting less than an hour affecting fewer than 1% of customers, more than a year ago. So, no?

I'm not sure where you got your information, but last year more than 800,000 homes and businesses unexpectedly lost power for 2 days according to NBC[0].

This year, in order to prevent the unexpected loss of power, many people were subjected to Rolling Blackouts[1] where their power was scheduled to be turned off for hours at a time and they had no choice in the matter.

[0] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-warned-brace...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout
I'm Italian, I know full well what you're talking about, I have zero sympathy for "the public doesn't trust us" type of lamentations because, guess what, it's their own fault.

What I'm saying is that papers like the NYT were at least trying to separate facts from opinions in their reporting. It's just painful to see such a healthy tradition become overshadowed by the political trend du jour.
Who is the media again?
> You wouldn't need to regulate facebook if it had real competition

And it would if the existing regulatory bodies did their jobs. But apparently they can be dodged with a truckload of political contributions.

As would any future regulatory body that legislators come up with. Ask people who live downwind of a chemical plant if the EPA works.
For me it's that whenever the media report on a subject I have expertise in, I can immediately see how much of what's reported is total bs.
That's why I love ZeroHedge. No credibility by definition, so you don't even expect it. You have to think on your own.

But, they provide very timely news on "market-moving" information (i.e. news that are/will be breaking news), often faster than mainstream media. So that is a very valuable service (for me).
Anytime you see politicians avoid a straight forward, transparent solution, for an opaque one, assume there are political games being played resulting in winners and losers.

Just like why a person working for a company offering 401k is allowed to save $19k in a tax advantaged retirement account, but a person working at a small sandwich shop not offering a 401k is only allowed to save $6k in a tax advantaged retirement account.
We use assemblyai at our YC startup https://pickleai.com for our transcripts and deploy our own sentiment and summary models to help users take more efficient notes on Zoom calls! Super happy with them!
> They made tinkering around so ridiculously unattractive

100$ a understaement,just keepting them workable between ios and xcode releases is non-trivial.

myself I have about a 4-5 pretty apps that were useful (to me and a few people at least) that just don't work anymore.. I could spend time fixing them but I'm time limited and don't use macos as my primary platform anymore

the intentional short shelflive of software on that platform is just crazy to me; like I know Apple does it to have the store 'clean it self up' over time but that's insane there's piles of software that just dosen't exist anymore

like what happens if an accident happens and a solo developer passes-away? their work is as if it never existed
Here is the actual dictionary for those interested [1].

[1] https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/94115/kinik...
As a programmer it's definitely appealing to be able to create a theme mathematically by just inverting. But then design will get their hands on it and you really have to be prepared for that with something like a semantic layer. It will look much better in the end as well.
Having unlimited vacation, for the first time this year, I'll say I kind of like it for a couple of reasons:

1. At previous jobs I treated the PTO like an asset. When I'd eventually leave the company, that asset would get paid out to me. So I'd be balancing the worth of a week off provided all of the overhead associated (such as coverage plans), with just finding another job in a year and getting a big check for the unused time, and finally taking a real break.

2. It is surprising how much I appreciate simply taking a day off without going into an inane HR system to log '8 hours PTO' and submit for approval or whatever. It makes me feel less like a row on the CFO's cost sheet and more of an autonomous person who's contributions are assumed.

> A study by Namely found that employees with unlimited PTO took an average of 13 vacation days, compared to 15 days for their fixed PTO counterparts. Why would this be?

The article implies that it's from fear of seeming lazy by comparison; there's probably truth to that but also working your life away is simply more cultural in the U.S., and people tend to behave as others do. Which is why we need a better standard for our workers as a country.
When I was in high school, I was near proximity to some kids that CNN did the same thing to. They took what would've been potentially a decent, local, investigative story and juiced it. How? They baited kids, who didn't know these other kids or the events they were involved in, directly outside of my high school into saying something for the news report. The average viewer would never know all those kids they interviewed had no knowledge of what they were talking about and it has since flavored how I receive these "nightly reports".
Just CNN?
I think that if the media had given Trump credit for Operation Warpspeed/the vaccines there’d be a lot less vaccine hesitancy on the right.

I’m not saying people being less hesitant because of that would be logical, but it’s one way their bias has actually killed people.

Frankly, Biden should have done so too. I think it would have been the best ethical and political move. Imagine if they did a commercial together telling people to get vaccinated.
Seems like a convenient excuse to walk back WFH. Surely the vast majority of Facebook employees would have been as helpless as Facebook's users to fix this outage.

What's preventing Facebook from continuing to offer WFH to many/most employees, with a minority of critical staff required to be on-site and compensated for it if necessary?
you are 100% correct!
This video referenced in this wiki article (footnote [25]) shows a methane cloud in the area more than a month after the incident. I know nothing of how gases move around in the atmosphere, but I would not have expected it to behave like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Fyevj25-o
> Isn't The Economist subscription-based?

They have ads in the printed version.
I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future.

AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.

And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network/platform component of AOL.

So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like?

Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don't see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.
Moving AdSense to a first-price auction
Author here. This is my first time hitting the front page, and I'm still catching up.

Most of the critical comments point out that this is a) not a good sign to investors and b) not a good deal financially for me. I appreciate the concern, and I think I should have done a better job at explaining the context:

- We are spinning off the product from the consulting company. We are getting new money from our existing investors, and it's them I want to show that I'm serious about this.

- I have a significantly higher equity share in the product company than in the consulting company.

I'm trading of salary for more equity. This is very common in startups, so I didn't explain this in detail in my post.

What I found interesting and potentially actionable for other people is that reducing my salary (and having more equity) has increased my focus to a point I couldn't reach when still a salaried employee.

I could have done a better job at sharpening the message, and I appreciate those that still saw my point and commented about it.
For your first point, I don't think a language such as JavaScript -is- much better, which is why Typescript was invented as an alternative for larger codebases/organizations
Video that discusses her possible biases and the trojan horse suspicion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRjSjjyfN1U
> This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook.

I find this comment so strange because the comment you're addressing never claimed that anyone else claimed users will abandon Facebook. You are actually creating a strawman argument here while accusing the other comment of it.
The Taliban aren't running disinformation campaigns on Americans via Facebook or Twitter.

Like it or not, people care more about a problem that affects them. That's like saying "if Americans /really/ cared about democracy, they would all be advocating for an invasion of Belarus".
They should close 401k and all other tax advantaged retirement accounts, and just have regular IRA and Roth IRA for everyone, and remove employers from the equation.
I live there. Peace is pretty stable. The political elements you talk about is mostly politicians posturing with weak hands that they dealt themselves.

Most people are pretty damn happy that we're in a situation where business will be able to export to the UK and all of it's future trading partners AND the EU with all of its future partners without much friction.

Granted, it hasn't all been smooth sailing, but the next election cycle here should provide a lot of clarity as to whether or not the place can become a great base to trade from.
Having to do a DNS lookup for each firewall rule is going to suck. Not to mention blackholing traffic when cached DNS replies are out of sync with the actual IP.
Finland joins Sweden and Denmark in limiting Moderna vaccine in men under 30
From a purely consumer perspective, Apple's policies are eminently sensible. Allowing external IAP makes it harder if not impossible to enforce simple cancellation.

If Apple allows external IAP, but _also_ requires strict dispute resolution and simple subscription cancellation, that would probably be deemed anticompetitive as well, even though it's thoroughly pro-consumer.

The problem here is that the regulatory scrutiny is only on one dimension, not the full picture. And in the full picture, Apple's policies are eminently reasonable—if their fees are a bit high.
Fact check: "Media did nothing wrong"
There have been no shortage of failed predictions. In the scientific valence this is totally fine because the wildest predictions are usually stated with low confidence, but the ‘environmental movement’ knows no such moderation.
Also the quality of integrated ads is far higher. I read integrated ads occasionally. I never read FB or Google ads.
My (previous) employer switched to Unlimited Vacation midway through the COVID pandemic. Many coworkers, including myself, assumed that this was a cost-saving measure to help cover up the fact that employees were not taking their usual vacations during pandemic--largely since they had nowhere to go. The legal stipulation was that you had the existing bucket of legally accrued vacation that you would continue to drain until you ran out, after which you would switch to the "unlimited" pool. Many people rushed to use their time off--I was a little suspicious of it, and continued to ration my time-off as I usually did (which is basically only taking a week off around July 4th and Christmas, to see family).

Sure enough, some months later, a large portion of us were sold-off/laid-off, and I still had about 80 hours of vacation time accrued prior to the switch, which was a decent chunk of change when it paid out. The people that had been riding the "unlimited" days got diddly.
Did they publish falsehoods knowingly? Every news source is going to make mistakes and retracting the story is normal.
> First, we need to ratchet back Section 230 as Haugen suggests

I don't understand how Facebook can get Section 230 protection if they moderate your feed? How is that not publishing?
I am reminded of something I noticed recently on the decentralized cryptocurrency platforms. Many, probably most, have Javascript that live-updates statistics. You can watch the tend thousandths of a cent place go up in "real time". Many such tickers aren't even showing any real data. Just a counter incrementing. And don't for forget all the fancy art! It's very heavily
gameified: flashy, one click, instant reward.

Looks like more mainstream apps are getting in the game game too.
> Those lobbyists must be doing a terrible job, since the Pension Protection Act of 2006 strengthened the reliability of defined benefit pensions.

Pensions were already dead long before 2006, and inevitable future pension failures baked into the system years and decades earlier. And in any event the PPA heavily favored 401(k)'s, the price extracted by Republicans for creating the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. And the PBGC itself also favored corporations. Nothing about the PPA directly addressed the underlying reasons pensions were failing; the PPA was about creating a soft landing.

> The problem is defined benefit pensions are extremely risky for beneficiaries since the existence of an employer decades into the future is a huge risk, as are changes in a world where things change quickly and many people do not stay at the same job for many years.

They're not risky at all. A pension is just an annuity, the corporate equivalent of employer-provided health insurance vs open market health insurance. Annuities, like life insurance, are considered some of the most reliable investments possible, precisely because of relatively strict, century-old reform legislation. See my response elsethread regarding fully funding requirements and the difference between employer vs independent management. Again, this notion that pensions are fundamentally risky is a false narrative. To the extent pensions are risky, it's only because the laws don't adequately address what in other insurance markets would be considered systemic accounting fraud.
People's main reason for using Python is the ecosystem.
Most problems do not need scale. Some problems require it. For those: use one of many proven "fast" languages. For everything else Python (or similar language) is more than adequate.
~4 weeks
>"updated their manifest to suggest they’re entertainment and not fact based."

This is not new, nor exclusive to Fox. The Daily Show goes out of it's way to declare they aren't a news outlet, and Rachel Maddow also calls her program entertainment rather than news.

Daily Show: Abandon News All Ye Who Enter Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show#/media/File:TDS...

"A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow's Viewers Know She Offers Exaggeration and Opinion, Not Facts": https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
(A) applies to a number of metals, including ruthenium, iridium, rhodium, and osmium, all of which are less abundant than gold. Although industrial demand has caused the price of those to rise in recent years, the difficulty of extracting them gave them essentially no value historically. Production difficulty may cause the production cost of a given asset to rise, but in a market that must also be met with equivalent demand lest the effort be in vain. For example, I could go outside, pick up a large rock, and spend the next several days crushing it into a fine powder. This would be a fairly difficult process, and yet the end product would be worthless. Rarity does not automatically equate to value.

(B) is perhaps gold's most unique physical property, but given the historical prominence of silver (a metal that corrodes rather easily), I seriously doubt that this alone justifies a single ounce of gold historically having been worth an average person's months of wages.

(C) is true of many metals, and has only come into existence as a method for verifying gold in more recent years, which again belies its historical value.
I'm not the person you asked, but IMO, 25 days seems reasonable.

That would allow for a week off between Christmas and New Year, two one-week vacations, and some extra days scattered around the year.
Poland′s top court rules against primacy of EU law
The Engineer's Guide to Figma
I'm not sure why you have state run media in scare-quotes. CBC is state owned and run: https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/vision/mandate

"the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as the national public broadcaster"

Further:

Minister Responsible: Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Heritage, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...
In that "No Rules" Netflix culture book, they talk about how Netflix doesn't have an expense policy, they just tell people to be reasonable and leave it up to them. That struck me as a harmful way to do it - basically forcing most people to err on the side of caution because they are worried about being seen as wasteful. Unlimited vacation policy is the same IMO.

It's captured perfectly in "17 pieces of flair is the minimum, some people choose to add extra to express themselves"
Take it with a pinch of salt as it's from the daily mail, but

"Some reports claimed company keycards were also knocked offline, meaning employees were unable to gain access to the offices or the server rooms - with some claiming employees were forced to, quite literally, break in."

Well that would work well for people working from an office.
> I have become increasingly convinced Python as a language is a "trap" for any use of notable scal

At what point do you embrace the trap and happily live with it?

For example Dropbox runs many millions of lines of Python, has massive traffic and their server costs aren't completely out of line for the service they offer. Their code base is also over 10 years old.

It seems to be working very well for them.

I talked to one of their engineers a few months ago. He gave me a complete run down of how they build and deploy Dropbox at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/82-dropbox-gives-you....
Have you ever tried to cancel a newspaper/gym membership? It's not easy. I want freedom from my subscriptions.

"Freedom from" is a quite liberating concept.
Better answer than the just-so ones that you've gotten so far:

It actually used to be that way. For example, it used to be the case that the Firefox product owner was a Googler getting paid by Google to work on Firefox. Lots of other contributors hailed from other companies (or universities), too, whether they were specifically getting paid for it or not; there was a long-tail of completely unpaid contributors. Mozilla wasn't anything like the Bay Area company you see today so much as it was, loosely speaking, a co-op. Mozilla's various formal organizational incarnations were supposed to handle, in order of importance: A. keeping the infrastructure running, and B. paying the salaries of its own contributors to the mozilla.org commons.

Several things changed this:

1. Google, the biggest contributor to the project, pulled their people off Firefox to go build Chrome.

2. Mozilla-the-Corporation, having deceived themselves about the role that the commons-style development played in the project's success, went and Netscaped it.

On the latter point: basically, the Corporation abused its position. They tried (and unfortunately succeeded) at consolidating things under their corporate structure (particularly during the FirefoxOS era after hiring an Adobe exec to be their shepherd through that doomed project—convinced that what Mozilla really needed was good, business-minded leadership). This launched Mozilla on the descent we've seen over the last ten years, and burned all sorts of bridges including goodwill with external contributors and other parts of its base. They hollowed it out, and then had people on payroll to fill in the parts that were getting fucked up. As with the case of Netscape, not all of their hires were good hires.

The perverse thing is, if you know anything about Mozilla's early history, i.e. Firefox pre-history, you'll know that this was already tried once before. What's amazing is that it actually "worked" this time. You'll hear (from people like Mitchell, even) stories about how mozilla.org was an escape pod, and that it had to be rescued from Netscape, because Netscape thought they were the rightful rulers by fiat—this, even after mozilla.org had been set up! Unfortunately, Mozilla-the-Corporation (distinct from mozilla.org) succeeded at taking control where Netscape failed, mostly because everyone involved pretty much let them. A lot of the mechanisms that had been put in _specifically_ to keep Netscape hires in their place were rolled back as part of the post-Firefox-4.0, "we want to move fast and break things, too" era.

Lots of people who at one point once had @mozilla.com email addresses will dispute this, choosing to tell themselves—and others—a different story. And of course they do. It happens for exactly the same reasons that the "are we the baddies?" meme is a thing.
You’re not entirely wrong, but one of the effects of the AT&T breakup was to allow customers to hook up non-AT&T approved devices to their lines. This lead to the popularization of things like answering machines and modems.

The latter had a pretty big impact.
Thanks for going open source!
I think HN needs a thread dedicated to exploring the word "censor". If you think it means "any deletion of content" then I support some forms of censorship.

If you think it means "the prohibition of the possession of thought or the ability to transmit that thought via your own mechanisms", then I am against it.
I'm not so sure. I think real competition would just force Facebook to be even more awful - more rage, more racism, more everything that drives engagement and lets them sell ads.
Nice.

Synthesizing this list with Vaclav Smil's work would be cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil

Maybe use TRIZ as a starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ But recast to focus on econometrics.

I'm certain this already exists somewhere. Vaclav is pretty dry reading, like reading an almanac, so I didn't get very far into his works.
Banqiao and Shimantan dams failure: 240,000 deaths, 11 million homes destroyed

> minor inconvenience

Hmmm.
Seem like a massive overreaction. Keep the sys admins on-site to manage your on prem gear but they should have been doing that anyway?! Surely when you're running your own servers for anything of any scale you need actual people nearby 24/7. Am I missing something?