skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People need to realize that the sales business model does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.

I (pretty much single handedly) made a reasonably profitable mobile app. It was my bread and butter for a decade. It has millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. It's a “power” tool, not a game.

Unfortunately, it depends on servers for a lot of it's core features. There are no accounts, data passes through my servers and, aside from caching, gets deleted as soon as feasible. I really wish I could avoid it, tried to reduce this as much as possible, and made servers as cheap as possible in the process. But it's still in the $100s/month, which I can't justify without compensation.

I tried donations, and have ad free paid versions: they don't cover costs. Ads are 95% of revenue.

People who paid $1 half a year ago will complain that I killed their pet if the server is down for an hour on a weekend. They've paid their hard won $1 after trialing the product for a month, and feel entitled to forever support of something that has running costs, in both hardware and brain power. Whereas I've made my buck, and have every incentive to tell them to f-off.

People on ads will give me a tenth of a cent everytime they use the app, so I have the incentive to keep then coming back. Of course I can be sleazy and trick them into clicking ads, or drown them in popup hell, or whatever.

But the point is, if $0.001 is enough to make a nice profit from each use of my app, there's no better model than ads. A $1 sale means I'm loosing money on a power user after a few years. A $1 yearly subscription is something users just won't do, especially without fancy upgrades. And, in all models I've tried, 95% of revenue is always ads. Sales don't even cover the costs of the sales channels.

That's why ads took over the internet, and you won't be turning that back.
Fundamentally, why do we work? We work for money. The employees want to make as much money as possible, the employer wants to make as much as possible. Management, representing capital, can make more money by paying their employees less. Therein lies the fundamental, unsolvable conflict between labor and management.
As Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."[0]

[0]https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-me...
Exactly why I developed advanced sci knowledge, so my narcissistic confidence and anti-social attitude can be defended!
JavaScript (for both React and Express) is all I use for work, unless you want to count HTML/CSS.

For personal projects I also use Swift and sometimes Python/GDScript.
Maybe give "HP Elite Dragonfly" a try?
So Unity is a digital ad company that gives away a game engine, or sells it at a loss, as a way to sell ads targeted based on what they know about the people playing the game. Ad revenue is in decline across the whole industry, so now Unity is looking to get a bigger slice of the pie by displacing AppLovin as the data harvester/ad provider

Aside: I wonder how much user data Unity-based games harvest from mobile devices. This may shed some much-needed light on privacy, advertising and mobile games.
I was a senior person at a company best remaining nameless that trained all new executives to never use the words “monopoly,” “fix prices,” “dictate prices,” despite the fact we had a required pricing schedule for retailers, bought back all excess inventory at cost to prevent a grey market, and dropped retailers that ran promotions. Their products were never on sale and accounted for 80% of retailers revenues, and they controlled 75% of their market segment. Whenever a new upstart brand came along they simply acquired them. Everyone sold their brands because it was known unless you were owned by this company you had no long term future in the market.

These sorts of market controlling companies are weird to work for. On the one hand they have a certain excellence that keeps their market lock year over year. On the other there’s a strangulating incestuous monoculture that self perpetuates a view of brilliance. You see this internally at other companies with these locks - google for one, googlers, especially hey day googlers, walk out with an ego the size of their market share. I’ve scrupulously avoided working there despite many chances over the years because of the smugness - not that I couldn’t work with that environment, I’m afraid I would adopt it as well.
I really like this. I wouldn't have thought to ask it either. Thank you!
Some new snippets from the Snowden documents
I think this is going to start in East Asia if anywhere
> if your conversations with your attorney are for planning or furthering an ongoing crime or fraud

Sure. But that isn’t what’s going on here.

Every regulated industry has blackballed terms. Communicating that to ensure employees don’t accidentally trip up, as well as informing them of the laws they are meant to follow, is totally legitimate.
Typically antitrust laws apply to a company using a monopoly in one industry to behave anti-competitively in another. Unity is behaving terribly, but they aren't a monopoly, and this isn't really even anti-competitive, it's just shitty. There's a greater case that they aren't properly representing the fiduciary interests of their shareholders.
I'm still suspicious of the idea that Google can have a monopoly anywhere except maybe in the Android ecosystem. It is too easy to move away from their products and go use something else. Nobody is under any pressure to use Google's search. Literally Google "alternatives to google search" and get a list of reasonable alternatives. If they have outstanding market share it is because they are just better, not because they have a monopoly [0].

But the problem I'm looking at here is the phrase "...you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power..." anticipates the result to some degree. This is a an exhaustive list of the guidance lawyers can provide. Both seem to anticipate that some wrongdoing has been done. It leads to shallow thinking:

... you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and lawyers tell employees not to use phrases like "We'll crush the competition".

... you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and lawyers provide no guidance, then employees use phrases like "We'll crush the competition".

Most of the work is actually being done by the initial frame, not what the employees are told.

[0] I wouldn't know, I don't use Google search.
Is there no automated way to defeat stylometry? Software that rewords and restructures writing so that it becomes unattributable? AI should be able to do it.
It’s not exclusive. You can tax multiple groups.

The financial problem can only be solved by taxing the middle class and cutting costs.

Of course you can tax the rich, that helps but is not sufficient.

Taxing the poor isn’t very effective because they are poor and don’t have much to tax.
Here's ref from another post that shows why someone might want a thermal camera phone (thank you @emmelaich). Also, they're actually available in a $500 camera phone.

Check out the MSX and AlphaBlending in an automotive mechanics shop.

https://www.catphones.com/en-us/cat-s62-pro-smartphone/
Err, nope.

As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:

Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.

This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".
Labeling the 4 parts Vocal | Melody | Bass | Drums, instead of Drums | Vocals | Bass | Other would go a long way to making it seem less programmer-y.
I am not making that mistake. Since I'm also involved in growing said alfalfa, I know very well how much water is used in merely growing it. That I didn't mention that in my reply isn't evidence that I'm making a huge mistake in thinking.

In my opinion, exporting any amount of water is too much.

Saying that doesn't mean I'm unaware of the other ways in which water could be better managed.
Kernel Samepage Merging
I think a simple fix would be a psychological, not technical one. Simply, it's "their" laptop. They don't return it at the end of the year and if they keep it in good form, then they have one. If they don't; they don't.
That’s why I skip even reading the title, and get right to mocking other commenters.
I can't think of one single way in which a Chromebook is less useful when offline than a laptop running some other operating system.
Google can't decide if they want it to be a cloud-terminal thin client OS or a powerful Windows-competitor, so we get the worst of both worlds.
It loops on one of my Macs, but not on this one. Both are using Safari, both are latest macOS. Same network (with a pi-hole running DNS), so I have no idea what the difference is.
Fucking fantastic
Ooh they even talk about DHTML! I had forgotten about that.
> a familiar, but irrelevant criticism of Andrew Yang

I don't know if it's irrelevant. He's the face and voice of the party, if nothing else, so whether or not he's trustworthy is very relevant. Being from that particular segment of the tech industry is one indicator of what his attitudes are.

I'm in favor of ranked-choice voting. I'm pretty wary of the Forward Party itself, though.
For me these impulses are mostly like uncontrolled pop ups of a kind of creativity. Somehow those appear addictive, my theory is, that is why they come in large bursts, unintentionally I persuade parts of my brain to produce new ideas. But too much is too much, causing overload and chaos.

I think it helps to make lists of things and ideas. Then

(1)prioritize. This will already generate more order and again some sense of control.

(2) just scratch out a lot of them, you do not need to follow all those paths. 10 or so can remain.

(3) only act upon the top prorities and just rely on the fact that you wrote down the gists of your other non scratched ideas, so you don't have to keep them all in mind.

(4) Some things of the list, you will find them outdated or silly after a while, so those become easy to scratch and let them go out of your mind as well.

(5)well done, you will find your ideas and way of working is a lot more organised!
Blackout doesn't strictly refer to electrical. Communication blackout is an example. Another example is for certain sports on TV may have a blackout due to contract negotiations and whatnot.

If somebody reads the first sentence of the article they would know it is electrical though...
Or it’s pop media who omitted “according to to china”
I'd say it's more like:

A lot of people are murdered in location A, we walk past location A frequently, let's not walk by location A anymore because the police are looking at us funny. Then they get pulled into the interrogation room and they use the fact that you stopped going by location A as evidence that you were involved in the murders (that kept happening even after you stopped walking by that location).
~Microsoft already has XBox, and CryEngine is also C#/.NET.~

see reply comment
Hacker News is this
The flip side is imagine a project manager did this to a programmer or architect. The programmer would constantly need to explain why the blog post they read dated 2013 about how hadoop makes everything faster is wrong, or how that AI paper is bullshit and designed to get someone grant money. Or how someone else’s experience with Azure was great because they just shifted all their Windows stuff to it. So that could kind of stuff get frustrating for the expert.
I think they did when they first announced it, and that it was going to be free (like Unreal/Unity). But that was also in 2015 and we've seen no public release of Source 2 since.
Thanks for sharing

Another thing destroyed by the infinite growth model
There are plenty of vaccines and treatments you can't get because they're not profitable to manufacture.
IIRC Newton also exploited his role as President of the Royal Society to attack Leibnitz. Just because he was a genius, doesn't mean that he wasn't also an arsehole. Maybe if he was was a more mellow and less driven, he wouldn't have been the genius he was.
ResMed and Luxottica are like that. Luxottica is a straight up abusive monopoly - they actually sell the insurance that they themselves take!

ResMed simply has better technology than others, and is a de-facto monopoly.
And why UK (whole UK I guess?) gvmnt isn't installing devices in Scotland?

> show that the rivers have lots of shit in them

irrelevant to Scotland, isn't it in itself indication that water privatization was shit?
You still need the fastest hardware. It would be better if Google just released a true Linux desktop and killed ChromeOS all together. This would allow native application install and better hw support.
What's the agenda news is pushing?
Fair, though my initial long fast did pretty much kill my cravings overnight
I think they meant the AI portion, not the technology to launch a website.

They do have an ai-sdk, but it would be interesting to see exactly how they used it.
No. But they shouldn't restrict sales based on birth / color, and allow everyone to buy-in. The problem here is that people who actually want to join/buy/agree cannot do so.
It's toxic for employees to say, "This is a bad thing we should explicitly avoid doing", and it's A-OK for employees to say, "Don't let anyone hear you say we are doing these bad things. If you must talk about these things, use different words, or you will draw critical attention to our behavior."?

Bullshit.
Very interesting! I definitely clicked on that logo when exploring the page
The downward trajectories are so strong now, it soon won't make any sense more to do these small deployments anyway.
Meanwhile… everyone else aged 10000 years.
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

You either die as a cool edgy app/platform or you live long enough to face the innovators dilemma.

Surprisingly, I think its a good thing on balance. It creates room for disruption from newcomers.
If you are only in a web only/SaaS type user.
Should child influencers have stronger rights to the income they generate?
The amount of monitoring, or even the amount of shit in the water aren't a good measure of how well privatization has served the public interest, at least not without context.

Monitoring is a good thing to have, and clean water is a good thing to have. Those are valid metrics, but what also must be considered are the costs of providing those services, how available/accessible the services are to the public, the price the public pays for them, etc.

I'd love to see an in depth analysis the impacts of privatization in the UK, but I'd be surprised if the public was better off because of it.

In the end, privatization tends to be the worst option because of one simple fact: in addition to total compensation of all the costs required to provide the service to the public, the private entity also demands that they make a profit on top of that.

A government can provide a service without any pressure to charge anything more than needed to keep the system going. Governments can even run essential services at a loss if needed. The government, unconcerned with personal enrichment, only has to worry about providing the best service to everyone.

The private corporation only cares about profits and the endless growth of those profits so they will do anything to enrich themselves even at the expense of the public.

Government is incentivized to provide what the public wants because when it fails they risk being voted out of office. Corporations are incentivized to provide as little as possible, spending as little as possible to provide it, while charging the public as much as possible and they are not accountable to the public at all.
Advanced Google Play Search
This is a handy site that allows doing what Google doesn't want you to do easily, like finding apps that have no ads, or use the minimum amount of permissions possible to get the job done.

A fun thing to try is to search for something like "flashlight" and sorting by permission count, both ascending and descending.
The Dragonfly Pro Chromebook (terrible naming scheme) is really fantastic. The Elite Dragonfly is a little weird. The Elite seems to be only available as a build-to-suit SKU that ships next February, and a comparable config to the Pro costs 3x more, while the Pro comes with the better display and ships today.
The issue isn't the phrasing. It's the conspiring to violate antitrust law. If you do conspire to violate antitrust law, then telling people to hide the evidence is furthering that conspiracy. That's not unfair, it's a misunderstanding of what the illegal part is.
Where's the voting reform? Without voting reform, even if this third party succeeds they'll just pull the ladder up behind them.
The problem is that short-term profitability isn't compatible with the long-term health of society, because often the easiest way to make a lot of money quickly comes as a form of societal exploitation. The most direct examples being chemically addictive products like painkillers and cigarettes, and now ad-based attention sinks like TikTok and Instagram.
‘Toy Story’ Animated Simulcast of NFL Game Set to Stream on Disney+ and ESPN+
> it's illegal to say the words

No, it absolutely is not.

The words themselves are in no way whatsoever at issue here. The focus is on the context those words exist in.
> We find a nonlinear relationship between knowledge and confidence, with overconfidence (the confidence gap) peaking at intermediate levels of actual scientific knowledge.

Dunning-Kruger isn't real.

Dunning-Kruger isn't real.

Dunning-Kruger isn't real.
> You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Bootstrapped, COVID hit right before the launch date.

Infra costs were ~$200 a month to support 10k DAU. I'd just come off of working on embedded, so I was used to writing really efficient code. :)

> At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Just needed to cover my living expenses mortgage and salaries!

Obviously to scale money was needed for ad campaigns, but people are lonely and offering to solve loneliness has a high conversion rate!
Record summer heat causes costly damage to Texas water systems
> Right, because it's expensive and difficult and would make the train cost more.

That you (and others) think network connectivity is anything higher than a rounding error in terms of rail infrastructure costs is likely part of the problem.
The figure I like to quote is that we need 2 to 5% of GDP spend per year to get to net zero by 2050.

We already pretty much passed 1.5C anyway, right?
Sure, but that's not Tesla's problem, just another hidden cost passed off to the consumer. Car insurance costs are skyrocketing, and people really should call to see how much a new vehicle is going to cost to insure first, but how many people really do that? From what I remember, I pay about 6x more than I did 20 years ago, but that's also because new cars are more expensive (inflation). I don't see cars getting significantly cheaper any time soon. New cars in China are competitive in price and features with any other new car but not like 10x cheaper. Despite the occasional "sale price", if Tesla can make a cheaper car they will also keep the profits.

But still, inflation is at 4% and car insurance went up +19% this year. [1] I'm sure it will keep raising every year until they find some nice equilibrium where... people don't want to buy cars? That doesn't seem very likely, what with all the amazing public transportation options we have in this country. However, insurance companies generally pay out more than they take in premiums. They invest the premiums to make their profits. So it's not entirely price gouging. Operating a vehicle IS becoming more expensive for a bunch of these reasons. But for a lot of people, it's also not an option. The top 3 reasons in that article are: worse drivers, more expensive repairs and (sad trombone) natural disasters.

Kind of a... situation our society has backed itself into over the last 100 years in promoting private car ownership over shared infrastructure. Who could have seen this coming? /s

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199032000/car-auto-insurance...
You can almost hear the lawsuits being prepared
I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. If you're making nails or something, then sure, your factory can only turn so many tons of coiled steel into nails per day. So other companies can exist that also make nails. In software, it's a little different; you moving a billion copies doesn't necessarily take any more work than selling one copy, so even if you "want to leave enough for everyone", you might not be able to. I doubt the Chrome team was saying things like "we shouldn't add tabs, that would be so bad for Internet Explorer".
With first past the post, it matters little what any third party thinks about those topics, so what's the point? What they are advocating for enables meaningful third party involvement in the conversation, trying to speak on those matter before that only serves to perpetuate the two-party state of affairs (for example, with ranked choice, and individual who is pro-choice and pro-gun-rights might actually be able to vote for a candidate who embodies their views on the matter).
This is crazy. Castings aren't repairable. Disposable cars aren't environmentally friendly.
I saw a twitter commentator point out that this is higher than the $40B Nvidia wanted to buy it for. Argument was that stricter antitrust could actually lead to greater shareholder value.
It makes little difference. Even if electric cars were 4 more energy efficient than ICE cars (and considering their construction cost, they probably aren’t), that’s still nowhere near enough. They’re still cars.

We could drop transportation energy use by at least 20 times if most of it was trains or trams.
Believe it or not, I have had more than one person tell me with sincerity that observing the contents of a box is "doing science", I imagine because they believe that science is actually the only way to acquire knowledge.

Meanwhile, these people mock the religious [in their imagination] for "being" insular/fundamentalist.
#2.5 someone who lets Karpathy explain it all :-)
Regardless of guilt or not, using this kind of training as evidence against them seems asinine. If you don't have clear evidence and need to resort to this to try to win your case, why are you even filing the case?
"We know the math, but lack the eye."

I do have the eye, but lack the skills in my hand. I can do shiny art, but am so slow compared to an skilled artist. So why should I do their jobs?

Blender has also an asset store btw, but not really comparible (yet). But the blender foundation would be a player I would trust to invest in them. I always stayed away from unity and it seems my gut feeling was right.
ChromeOS always seemed to me an expression of the main stem of Google culture. Android, if that is the distinction you were drawing, is from an alien planet.