jagtesh

Ah. It all makes sense now. It is cheaper for them to layoff with a decent 3 month severance than it is to pay high interest on the debt that is funding their salaries (interest rate will stay high > 1 year, going by Powell’s comments).

I am glad they did it transparently, but I wish they had been more open about this fact. Shifts the entire perspective IMO.

You have to scroll down a bit to the image that describes the keyboard in great detail. It includes a mouse trackball. The keys use some kind of clicky switches. The buttons themselves are possibly hard plastic (a good thing). Colour me impressed.

Keyboard image blowup: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/3833f7_df1d45d717da4487ba...

Summary: Merchants store the token, instead of credit card details. Token is only valid for use between merchant and payment provider (requests very likely need to originate from the registered merchant URL). Conceptually, similar to OAuth. Why hasn’t this been done before?

Facebook (the social app) and Google (Ads, Play Store, etc) are no different. I’ve read countless accounts from many individuals and small/independent app developers about their accounts being suspended or terminated with little to no means of redressal.

I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud. They are willing to accept false negatives instead of false positives.

I worked in an organization that prided itself with great customer service, and they did deliver. The cost of doing so (resolving each case manually, often giving benefit to the customer) is significant.

Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Not an apples to apples comparison though, Twitter is ad based (much higher volume/users needed for revenue) unlike Amazon.

More users = more challenges with the same level of staff. That’s how you end up with a cheap processes (lots of automation, outsourced reviews) designed to handle 90% cases vs. an expensive/more thorough process (manual checks by experts along the way) that can handle 99% cases.

One big reason for this is the tax law in US and Canada. Legally, contractors (esp. when incorporated) are considered employees if they work exclusively for one client over an extended period of time without interruption. Occasionally, I have seen such contractors take a few month sabbatical and return to work after that (still contracting).

Note: There are other criteria that have to be met as well for the govt to consider someone an employee: - if work happens a the employer’s premises - if the employer owns all equipment needed for work - how is the work instructed - can denote a manager/employee dynamic)

What’s wrong with removing the commands and adding shell aliases instead? That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

eg. In bash, they can be expressed as:

alias fgrep=grep -F

alias egrep=egrep -E

This sounds like a push for purity - similar to what happened in Python 3 with the move from print “xyz” (special keyword) to print(“xyz”) (standard function).

The new function requires three additional keystrokes every time it is used.

Clever tricks in programming are an anti-pattern. When writing code in a social/collaborative setting, it is imperative to write it in an inclusive way.

Heck, I’ll coin this term here - you heard it first on HN - inclusive programming. Write code so others can easily understand it, and more importantly, contribute to it.

Social networks, news sites, online marketplaces or retail.

I would imagine the experience to not be any different from trying to use the Twitter app when you lose connectivity. The app can choose to either: 1. Degrade the experience gracefully. Still function in a limited way. 2. Display a network error message, pausing whatever action the user was about to take. Keep retrying for a bit.

PWA can get you almost there. But LiveView is server rendered (business logic lives on the server). A loss of internet would render such an app unusable.

With this technology, I believe they are bundling the Phoenix LiveView server in the binary - to alleviate that gap. It’s like packaging node + app in a binary.

I think, the appeal here is LiveView. You can develop a SPA/OPA native app without writing any JavaScript. The code is entirely Elixir + HTML + CSS. Bundle it with SQLite and you’ve got a decent stack now that can even work offline.

Disclaimer: I didn’t see many details on the project page. My assumptions may be incorrect.

Also a clear lack of empathy. I mean, sure, the person did something wrong. But have they stopped being human? Where is the humanity in squeezing every penny out of someone already broken and poor ($250/day is more than what many Americans earn in a day). Then taking away 50% of any hope/real shot at living they have. This sounds like profiteering at their expense. (Edit: this is evil).

Jail time and a permanent record is more punishment than it sounds. It severely affects future employment, even things like renting an apartment or getting a car loan (the ubiquitous background checks are done to weed such people out).

In-vitro Swedish study

Would love to understand from anyone what this could mean for liver cells that undergo this RNA to DNA transformation (and absorption?) into their nucleus. Please excuse my naïveté. I am completely unfamiliar with the mechanisms in the microscopic biological realm.

Disclaimer: I am vaxxed (including Pfizer).

Study source: https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73/htm

I find it quite odd that payment providers are being singled out. They aren’t going after the cloud provider, or the other services helping this company run their operations.

if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn’t exist..

This seems to be the only plausible explanation. Going after them by exploiting a legal technicality (hacking the law). I don’t know if I feel any better about this approach, than I do about the original allegation.

Perhaps, it’s the part of me seeking some order in this world, holding out for a more pure form of justice. An ideal that doesn’t exist in reality.

You’re both right. Snowflake as a technical slang/jargon generally refers to “flaky” or light-weight solutions that aren’t expected to withstand the test of time/scale.

Snowflake, the data warehousing platform, on the other hand is a juggernaut - in a league of it’s own (I suppose comparable to BigQuery and RedShift).

Last thing I expected to discover on HN. This is incredibly useful for any DIYer. Thanks OP!

Edit: Usually I refrain from thank you posts on HN but I had to make an exception owing to the unique nature of this post.

I used Nim for hobby projects many years ago (when it was fresh out of being called Nimrod). Then it went through a phase of constant (breaking) changes and I couldn’t keep up. The code you shared looks beautiful - you’ve convinced me to take another look at it.

This is very cool! Nice work OP. A lot cleaner and intuitive than even Vala (which in itself was a giant leap forward in GTK development).

Short unambiguous answer is yes. However, the destination doesn’t have to be limited to stock/bond markets. Think property, gold or toilet paper rolls. Last one is a joke.

It’s hard to accurately measure investments flowing into property (what part of the world?). There are many variables to consider and I don’t think there’s a single trend that will end up as a winner. My hypothesis is that we will see many (eg. very wealthy doing X in Y country/city, middle class doing A in B country/city, etc).

You’re on point except for one big difference: a block chain is distributed.

I don’t think it is foolproof, as no tech really is. But the concept seems to significantly raise the cost and complexity of an attack to compromise it.

The simplest way I can imagine doing it is - spoofing network requests from the party trying to verify something, or routing that request to a compromised node. I will make a guess that networking equipment in a govt. setting can protect against a low level attack.

Disclaimer: I take a passive interest in this space but have never studied or implemented a block-chain application.

Extending programming patterns to how executive management operates: they need a very high level language with support for generics and abstractions to communicate efficiently without getting caught in the details. That is the job of lower level management.

Terms like “innovation” are a placeholder for something that will vary greatly depending on the instance.

The above commentator didn’t pretend to know anything. It’s an honest question and they asked with utmost humility.

Here’s the question: what’s stopping a significant adoption of blockchain technology from a _business perspective_.

I have my own take on this. It could be the increasing cost of transactions (in practice). Not indifferent from your current day financial systems, as we have inflation that causes costs to rise. Perhaps it’s the sudden rise, the volatile nature of fluctuations that make it different for crypto currencies. Perhaps the entire issue here is we measure fluctuations against fiat currency.

As more businesses start to operate entirely in crypto (producers and consumers) - we may see a more stable crypto ecosystem.

As for why is blockchain not gaining traction, it is somewhat related to above. Miners provide the backbone for any successful blockchain network. In a centralized system where all actors already trust the centralized authority, there is little business incentive in setting up a sophisticated ecosystem based on blockchain.

I’ve heard about governments considering using blockchain based tech to thwart internal corruption (immutable public records FTW). As these systems are developed, researched and then evangelized by the likes of HBR, we’ll start to see much greater adoption in time IMO.

People forget that at the end of the day, we are biological machines. Neural networks are so effective because they are modelled after how our brains work (albeit in the simplest sense..so far).

It learned by looking at chat conversations because humans learn the same way. Children learn by repeating and mimicking in their most nascent years.

As far as AI/machines and their sentience is concerned, I believe its a question of belief. As a society, at what level of AI sophistication do we start to consider it comparable to us. Unpacking that question can offer us some clues.

I don't understand what it changes for vc

Their portfolio companies can go bankrupt. It is a Darwinian (survival of the fittest) moment for all the companies at this time.

We’re experiencing a (likely) shrinking economy, with fewer customers who are spending more conservatively. VCs want their companies to succeed and preserve wealth.

Skimmed through. Here’s a thought: What’s the alternative to philanthropy? If the answer is “democracy“, what does it mean in this context?

To me, that means an elected body that decides through representation what is the best use of funds. It does so with no direct oversight, or “unacceptable paternalism”.

Sounds an awful lot like a government, doesn’t it? How does a government raise funds? Through taxes (simplified view for the sake of argument. Ignore printing money and selling treasury bonds for a moment).

But this is how we function already. So in lieu of philanthropy, can we create a new class of voluntary tax? Or raise taxes on high income? Considering that philanthropy is a purely voluntary act - I think forcing anyone is against that spirit and a voluntary tax, or volunteering funding of govt projects could be the solution.

Having said that, I fail to see how this will not also get politicized and lead to greater influence for the donors.

I’m not sure if there’s a way to accomplish that while still keeping things voluntary, in the spirit of philanthropy.

Granted, Oculus makes fantastic products that are making VR more accessible. However, as a business, it has been investment heavy[1]. Meta continues to make 10s of billions of dollars worth of investment to build an ecosystem around it.

I don’t think Zuck foresaw the level of investment he’ll need to make before turning profit.

Oculus (and the “Metaverse”) is a 10-20 year play, betting on people changing their habits and using VR as their primary medium of engagement online. They’re trying to build an iPhone/iOS like integrated hardware and marketplace experience, but it remains to be seen if they’ll be profitable as a business.

[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/despite-quest-2-sales-success...

Zuck controls the board though! Majority voting rights. Still, have to give it to him. Need guts to make such a call. WA and Instagram, the Crown Jewels of Meta.

Then again, nobody wins all the time (cough oculus cough).

This is easy - you need to work with your legal team to come up with a pre-planned stock trading plan. The thing is, you cannot buy/sell your stock on a whim (as you are privy to material information most shareholders are not). But you can do so in a pre-planned manner, eg. Sell X qty every quarter. You should be able to exercise the options regardless - this only affects the timing of when you are able to sell the exercised stock.

Note: I’m not a lawyer, just someone know knows a thing or two about this.

ADHD is the result of physical differences in the brain. You could be managing as well as a neurotypical individual, but that doesn’t mean you’re no longer someone with ADHD.

You are born this way. Such as someone on the ASD spectrum.

First of all, thanks for sharing this OP! So glad to see a way to query a df using SQL without further transformation.

Arrow has been truly revolutionary in this regard, providing a solid in-memory data format (with performant APIs in many languages) for interchange between different engines and even formats.

You can go from ORC to Parset to CSV on a local FS or S3.

With DuckDB, it’s like you can build your own AWS Athena at likely a fraction of the cost. Now if only someone would integrate vaex with DuckDB, it will make your powerful Apple Silicon machines a compelling alternative to running a full fledged Spark/Hadoop cluster.

Early April 1 prank?

Clickbait title. Applebee franchise’s exec, not Applebee exec.

Either way, a very low/apathetic thing to suggest taking advantage of people who are already in survival mode.

Wasn’t ReasonML different from BuckleScript even then?