skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Chinese companies aren't competitive due to CCP or authoritarian regime, but they're competitive because they're the underdogs on western markets

China has been accused multiple times of assisting their companies with absurd amounts of government subsidies (leading to at least Europe and the US enacting counter tariffs), as well as using government and private industrial espionage and hacking campaigns to clone Western products.
Author here. Thank you very much for sharing this list. I'll consider each of your points.
I'd say about 15-25% of Meetup's revenue comes from people who don't know they are still paying for a group, because its a subscription that only gets billed once every 6 months. So many groups are dead. Before the pandemic it might of been maybe 5-10% but afterwards its much much higher.

Odds are anyone you unsubscribe from will spam you in a newsletter. Even if you opt out, you'll be re-added a year or 2 later. I've learned to use certain gmail for certain sites/services to prevent them spamming up my personal domain emails.

I really hope they make it 1 click to cancel as a law, I've had to call in my CC as stolen at least 2 or 3 times to end something or to prevent some trial period from charging me.
How about IT, as opposed to software development?

As long as we have human using computers, we'll have more skill humans helping the humans.

We were told that inventing web search engines and giving kids ipads would completely eliminate IT. We see how that turned out LOL.

From a financial standpoint, as long as the top 1% of "IT skills" population can make the other 99% of the company more than 1% more profitable, they'll never get fired, well, completely anyway. At big companies its a pretty low bar to surpass, and small companies can contract with MSPs.

From a cultural / psychology standpoint, its pretty deeply ingrained that some folks are dumb/lazy/ignorant and thats OK, some folks have intense learned helplessness as a character trait, and some folks get really excited about forcing others to "do their work for them" WRT primate dominance. We as a culture will never avoid the appeal of BYOD, even with a miracle of 100% BYOD in IT, we as a culture would STILL hire cloud admins just so the job can be delegated if nothing else.

The pay in IT in most of the country is ... microscopic compared to software dev. New grads or people with nothing but an A+ are not getting new Stanford grad software dev salaries, its more like $22 to $25/hr in most of the country for a new help desk jockey. And it's pretty boring work for 99% of the employees 99% of the time. However, if chatgpt can fizzbuzz better than humans, doing "IT stuff" beats starvation for us computer people.

Its also worth pointing out that AI as a tool is just biased single answer web search. Web search more or less resulted in more employment. Seems likely this variation on the theme will result in more employment.
Thanks everyone for the comments and feedback on my article!
I was laid off a few years ago. I wouldn't say nepotism was the cause but it was rampant. I butted heads with my direct manager. He didn't understand how software is produced. If C-levels didn't like something we were building, he'd double down and quadruple the feature set thinking they would find some aspect useful. The layoff didn't negatively affect me although I was taken by surprise. I thought upper management would see that I was doing right. He had a special place because his brother in law was in the upper tier. It wasn't a great fit anyway and I got a great job afterwards so it was probably for the best.
Your reasoning about "learning from environment" isn't much better than "magically change" as it's very speculative.

> Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists..

Do you? Japan has proven highly adaptable in the past.
Not slavery, but https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
You grow into it then it grows into you…
Whitewood boards are great and very cheap, but I would still opt for MDF.

Kiln dried whitewood still produces sap and dents easier than any MDF I have worked with.

By whitewood I presume you mean that mysterious asian species of wood, that dominates the market.

Byt here's my tip - for amateur woodworking, go to a speciality lumber yard that sells S4S. They have discounted and returned items at fairly low prices. I made two bedside tables out of warped, cracked oak shelving S4S boards at about 30% of the cost of materials. But... that was still a hobby project that I had spare time for. If I accounted for the average cost of a carpenter's hourly wages - those items would cost easily $2000 each in labor.
It’s nice that this was blocked, but they really should have blocked the Bethesda acquisition. Buying the best selling game franchise (Elder Scrolls) and making it an exclusive is a cut and dry anti-competitive move and Microsoft should have been punished for even trying.
There is another possibility here, which is MS + Activision - Cloud Gaming > MS + Cloud Gaming.

I wonder if MSFT is considering that at all. They obviously have the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if cloud gaming hasn't seen the growth they expected and it makes sense to kill it entirely.
And another high impact security bug in git today:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2189767
Microsoft also owns Minecraft and they put that everywhere. For Microsoft it is all about GamePass. They want to be the Netflix of games, but to do that they need a large library of games on their service that people want to play to make it a no-brainer subscription.
Nah, I think you might be. Most people I know have locked themselves out once or twice.
> I don't know why you growth fascists get in such a twist about it.

An attempt to justify their own decisions while still being judgemental about the decisions of others. Meat-eaters get enraged, too, when you talk about pollution and disease; and constant tourists try to minimize their individual burning of huge amounts of jet fuel by using collective statistics that elide the fact that 90% of people in the world rarely or never fly.

A lot of us are conservative about everything in the world except things that affect our own lifestyle or our loved ones, when we suddenly become permissive. Others of us are very liberal about how the world should be run, but very strict and demanding when it comes to their own things and their own families.
>"Seeing a lot of comments saying UK couldn't function without Microsoft"

Too Big to Fail should be recast as Too Big to Exist
Good! There is no sane reason to allow Microsoft to own one more company and just become bigger in another market.

It has nothing to do with their core business (which is quite diverse to be fair), and as an end consumer, on average, this would just cause harm long term, considering consoles and gaming market in general.

One example: Call of Duty. Might not be important for many people, but having CoD become unavailable on the most popular console, just because someone had huge amounts of money and bought a $69B dollar company doesn't sound fair and would be a net loss for the industry.
> It also means less people doing innovation

Not necessarily. Only a small proportion of the general population "does innovation". In fact, automation and boosting productivity may mean (even should mean) more people doing high-value, innovative work.

> and markets that start getting smaller

It does not matter if a market gets smaller by number of consumers if total population also reduces and individuals are better off.

For instance, smaller population means smaller construction industry but also likely fewer builders. Does that imply that a builder will be individually worse off than now? No. They could even be better off if productivity increases drastically.
> line-height: calc(1em + 0.5rem);

Even cleaner imho, at least in theory, if you dont use 'em' but 'ex' for the relative sizing, the x-height of the element's first available font.

Good looking leading is often more influenced by the x-height of a typeface than by cap height (try setting Verdana and Times with the same line-height). So especially if your design has more than one typeface, using ex makes it more consistent.

Caveat: If the metrics are not set correctly in the font file, FF on Mac, and the Windows browsers will freak out. Should not be a problem with system fonts, but if you use web fonts, keep an eye on that.

I usually also set a unitless fallback, at least on the html element.
No, actually you have to log into chatGPT as well in another tab. There are no backend servers looking at what you write.
Bottom line, a college degree is worth the cost and then some
The Design Sprint methodology is a structured and effective way to approach complex problems and challenges in the world of business and entrepreneurship. It was developed by Google Ventures to help teams create and launch innovative products in a short period of time, usually five days. However, the Design Sprint methodology can also be adapted for solopreneurs, that is, individuals who undertake solo, and in this article, we will show you how to do it.
This crap is what prevents me from subscribing US press. I would love to some of their titles but I am a foreigner and there's no way I am going to call a number in US to cancel.

I am also not desperated to create burner cards for paying for those.
The demo link doesn't work.
the main constraint isn't the walls but the land it's built on.
I work for a non-UK company that has some online customers in the UK and in the EU. We have to collect each country's VAT on those sales.

Before Brexit we used the VAT MOSS system, which allows non-EU companies to register in a single country, collect the appropriate VAT on EU sales, then quarterly send the total VAT collected and a form showing total sales for each country to that single country's tax folks, and that country deals with distributing the VAT to the separate countries.

Post Brexit vote we continued to use VAT MOSS (which has since been renamed to something else that I'm failing to remember) although we switched our registration from the UK to Ireland [1] just in case the UK did something stupid and failed to negotiate a Brexit deal in which they remained part of the VAT MOSS system.

They in fact did fail to remain in the VAT MOSS system, and so we had to register with the UK for VAT. They told is that the tax office was a bit busy dealing with Brexit so it might take a while to actually issue our VAT registration number, which we need in order to actually pay collected VAT to them. They said that until then we should collect VAT, but not call it VAT, and hold on to it.

That was over 4 years ago and we are still waiting.

A country that for 4 years and counting has to tell businesses to not remit collected taxes because that country cannot manage to issue the registration numbers that would allow those businesses to file their tax reports is not a country that instills confidence that they could handle something that is actually hard like switching OS/office suite/cloud.

[1] In retrospect, we should have used Ireland from the start. Getting registered in the first place for VAT MOSS in the UK had involved a lot of paperwork and time, and the quarterly filings required submitting separate spreadsheets for the UK and the rest of the EU.

Ireland registration took a few minutes online. To file we just copy/paste the data from our quarterly VAT report script into a text box on a web form and submit it.
The EU has this tool for viewing solar radiation data and estimating energy yields based on location & angle: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html

The interface isn't great, but i find it pretty useful sometimes.
Yeah, I agree with you. I'm torn if I should use the Github release process or not on this. The "Getting Started" section lists my own preferred way to download these files. Maybe I should just get rid of this zip file. That would simplify my release process anyway, which I realize is far to complex for this little thing.

Thanks for the feedback.

Edit: I've reworded the page a bit based on this and other feedback too.
Yes, both companies have offices around the globe, with corporate entities all over the place. As those have to operate within the laws of the countries they're incorporated in, if they get blocked by some local watchdog, the acquisition wouldn't be able to be completed in that country.

More so, the merger is also discussed in the EU in general, which is a bigger market than just the UK alone, and if the acquisition gets blocked in the UK, EU watchdog will surely use that block as prior material for doing a EU-wide block.

Hence Microsoft is lobbying both the UK itself and Europe wide for making the acquisition go through.

Of course, even if the acquisition gets blocked everywhere but in the US, the US counter-part can still be acquired, but not sure how much sense that would make, they'll probably end up not going through with it at all in that case.
I would blame this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Ig3X59_qA
Microsoft is 3rd place on consoles, non-existent on pc, non-existent on mobile. And this deal would have moved it to 3rd place in publishing.
But "pro-nuclearism" is just being pro-science and pro-reality. How on Earth can that poison any debate? One side is lying and the other is not and you claim they are equally bad?!
Show HN: Taru – A simple local task runner
Taru is a simple tool I built for simplifying task and workflow management on unix-based systems. It's an alternative to using makefiles and shell scripts with its YAML-based configuration that resembles that of e.g. GitHub workflows.
ErmnMusk
You're extrapolating a trend in an unrealistic way. I don't think they will go "extinct" as you put it. I think it is more likely their population will only decline to a certain level.
There's something to be said for not pissing people off.

Certain other search engines would still accept the filetype:torrent search key for the longest time after, with no problems whatsoever. (Currently doesn't seem to work anymore, mostly because I think people switched to magnet links).
> Others have mentioned Fabrice Bellard's LTE code, but (AFIAK) it's not freely available. Don't take this as a criticism. Bellard has done some great Free software and it shouldn't be expected that he will release everything as Free software.

Also, I think that if Fabrice would release it as open-source, the pros/cons balance would be different compared to other projects (ffmpeg, qemu...) because

* very few people would be able to use and benefit this, considering that 1°/ you need proper (expensive) hardware, 2°/ anyway you cannot use licensed bands, 3°/ actually you can (mostly) also not use unlicensed bands without proper support from phones and without implementing the required band-sharing mechanisms from the regulation (e.g. listen-before-talk), and anyway LAA requires to use a licensed band as an anchor for signaling...

* it would have cancelled a source of revenue (today through Amarisoft)
Show HN: Artificial Intelligence Radio
AI Generated Music 24/7
Thanks
How do you reason about program?
Do you workout examples by hand ?
Or prove it formally by mathematics
A lot of people on this site earn a shit ton of money.
A More Constructive Conversation Between Policymakers and Intelligence Analysts
If the ad revenue isn't measured in terms of the consumption on the pirate streams then it's not ad revenue. Advertisers don't pay for eyeballs they can't quantify.

If content is consumed via an illegal streaming site then it's potentially hurting revenues elsewhere.
I wish the US had the guts to do things like this, but I suppose they don't due to lobbying.
Nvidia Guardrails: Building trustworthy, safe, and secure LLM systems
If their population began declining twice as fast as now (1% per year) it would take around 105 years for the Japanese population to reach the level it was at back in 1900.

It would take 500-1000 years for it to actually go "extinct" (depending on what do you mean by that).

A lot of things can happen in this time frame. So claims like:

> The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.

Seem pretty absurd...
Bloomberg is shocking here. You have to go several links to get to a ChatBot. To ask to cancel to click links. To cancel.

What on earth? Why?
Dying young is not generally a problem for getting recognition. Certainly there are lots of famous discoverers who died young (Evariste Galois comes to mind, but is maybe too extreme an example to be representative).

I agree the impact of informal communication likely played an underrated role.
Microsoft is pretty consistently in last place in console market share and the Xbox brand is dwarfed by Sony and Tencent (China).

Microsoft's strong current position in Cloud Gaming isn't because XCloud is devouring all the competition, its because the competition barely exists in the first place. Google and Amazon left their cloud gaming products to rot and GeForce now is very janky (but still quite popular from what I've heard!). Google and Amazon's mismanagement of their products doesn't automatically make XCloud into an aggressive anti-competitive monopoly, especially when you consider the fact that Microsoft inked a 10-year deal with Nintendo's cloud gaming provider to provide Call of Duty to the platform last month.
Dessalines, the author, also is the main contributor of Lemmy (an open source Reddit clone in Rust that's on the Fediverse). He's a very ideologically motivated programmer, a socialist, and I admire him very much.

https://github.com/dessalines

https://join-lemmy.org
Why We Remember – and Forget
If I threaten legal action against you and you hire a lawyer to respond to me, and I then take no further action, am I liable for your lawyer’s fees for the response? I believe the answer is no but I don’t know for sure.
PRC "progress" was a form of control. CCP basically handed everyone "rings of power" to rule over them. All their wealth is meant to be kept inside because that's control of the nation. Imagine if they didn't have currency controls, every rich person there would dump the Yuan for other currencies and overseas real estate. Meanwhile, all the inflated properties in the PRC will drop significantly. Unrest or instability is not good for CCP.
Hmm, what is "behavioral variation within a single mouse and between mice"?

I get variation between mice, but is variation within a single mouse the range of behaviour?
> The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.

This is magical thinking. It like imagining that if someone diets long enough, they'll disappear. Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
Yep, at 0.1-0.2% (1000-2000ppm) people start to get drowsy. at 0.2-0.5% (2000-5000ppm) people get heachaches, poor concentration, elevated heart rates, etc. It's quite unpleasant. 3% is 30,000 ppm.

While wearing a mask isn't fun, I've never experienced anything to that level while wearing mine.

Not buying it either.
It may be not as bad as it sounds if we see the advances in age reversal happening. The next 50 years will be nothing like the last 50 years, and the last 50 years were full of changes.
> border-box is about layout, content-box about content. You should aim to design things around content, not layout: leave layout to the parent.
> border-box is incompatible with ratios: you need content-box there.
> border-box is only actually useful for things like making body fill the viewport.

I get the contrarian thing, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Both border-box and content-box are about content; it's just a matter what's included or not in the width of a box. Sure, there's some truth about what designers expected, but they weren't the only ones who were confused about how a box's border and padding changed how content worked…

There's a reason why virtually every widely-used CSS framework starts by changing content-box to border-box.

It's one of those issues that if we could go back in a Time Machine, content-box would have been the default; this is the next best thing:

html { box-sizing: border-box }
*, *::before, *::after { box-sizing: inherit }

References

From 2012, which started it all: https://www.paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/

Developers are so psyched, border-box has a holiday: "International box-sizing Awareness Day"—https://css-tricks.com/international-box-sizing-awareness-da...

CSS Tricks almanac: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/b/box-sizing/
that’s how GCP does zones, firewalled off with separate networks/power in the same physical location.
Can someone explain how a UK regulator can block a deal between two US companies?
I use a virtual debit card and cancel that when I want to end a subscription.

I've had about 5 emails from Microsoft this week about my Xbox ultimate ending.
Chevy Bolt EV and Bolt EUV production is ending this year
The conspiracy theorist in me can't help but think about the fact that most of the corporate/leadership power at Sony Playstation resides in Europe these days.
I'm getting horrible flashbacks of OVH DC's those many years ago.
It really depends on the financing terms. If the purchase was made with too much debt, then you need to bounce as there is only one way the business’s trajectory will go.

With near 0% interest rates, revenue multiples went crazy, and most of the time, the purchase price was too high to do anything other than squeeze employees and customers and try to pawn off the business on greater fools.
> What's the issue here, people can't export backups of the passkeys?

Quite the opposite. You can, and are always advised to, have a second key as backup that you can keep in a secure location. So in the same way as you don't lose your home if you lose your home's keys, you don't lose your digital access if you have a backup passkey. There is a slight difference between the two scenarios as in the case of your home, you wouldn't lose it regardless of whether you have a backup key or not. But since you can easily have a backup passkey the difference is very small.
I'm still amazed that a series sposored by Ubisoft can be such a sharp satire about the games industry.
> mostly privately held

Nah. Privately held means that they don't need to pander for next quarter's numbers. Publicly traded is always a race to the bottom.
It's interesting how these companies seem to optimize for retention by making it hard to unsubscribe but that's probably not optimal for acquiring customers.

I would probably subscribe to the nytimes but I've been discouraged by the stories of how hard it is to cancel.
> If gamers wanted quality, they should have spent their money accordingly instead of consistently buying shit

The key thing is marketing. The giants have insane amounts of budget to market their games to heaven and beyond.
The whole thing seems incredibly wrong and strikes me as being made by somebody very unaware of the ecosystem around them.
I got the impression that node is needed to build but isn’t a dependency for the app you ship.
3 Important Ukraine related maps (My Maps) were taken down in the last 24 hours
> how does this deal make any financial sense to Microsoft if the plan wasn't eventually to implement anti-competitive practices much later down the line

I'm also not a fan of this deal, but I think this is a good question worth an answer. I think you'd need to suggest exactly what practices they may want to implement.

For example it's not hard to see why they would continue to want to put COD on PlayStation systems: that brings in a ton of money. You can imagine a world where yanking it helps Xbox, but I don't think that's an inevitable result; would they really want to give up $X Billion in revenue from PlayStation if that only brings in $Y Million in new Xbox sales? Obviously it all depends on the numbers, but it's an example of why they can still benefit from this transaction without implementing anti-competitive practices.
If you have fewer people to pay pensions for the elderly, you will have to raise taxes. No ?