skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Build vs. buy? Or: How many logins are too much?
I'm a (software dev) contractor who has taken over IT operations for a services-based medical company with a mobile team that goes to customer locations.

I have built a custom web app for their business which handles the "core" of what they do. They often need new functionality to help employees do a better job, and every time this comes up I'm torn between building & buying. Some examples of functionality they've requested:

* Job dispatching (built into the web app)

* Time tracking for employees (bought 3rd-party software)

* Team communication (bought)

* Invoicing (built into the web app, due to custom processes)

* Managing a warehouse of supplies (bought)

I'm now faced with a new problem: Keeping track of expensive equipment that must change hands between employees.

None of our existing software handles this, so I'm stuck on build vs. buy.

On one hand: Employees already manage 4 logins for various services, so I'm hesitant to add another.

On the other hand: I'd like to avoid adding complexity to our existing software if it isn't necessary.

I work alone, so I'm reaching out to HN to see if there are any good resources, experiences, evaluation frameworks, etc. for making this decision for small businesses. Evaluating which is "better" feels like a shot in the dark. Thank you!
No, because your fee is constantly competing to get into the block against future fees as miners sort the mempool by satoshi/byte to fill up the block.

Check out the asymptote: https://estimatefee.com/
Fascinating. Across the pond, Nintendo has a pretty hard stance against it (but not explicitly since their corporate history has strong gambling ties in the early 20th century), and Akira Toriyama has refused to license his IP to the pachinko slot machine industry while almost every other peer of his has done so.
When did $4.30 transaction fees become even close to acceptable. I thought high TX fees was one of the things Bitcoin was purported to solve.
Banks and other institutions are willing to sell debt to collection agencies for pennies on the dollar, but aren't willing to make those same concessions to the debtors themselves, regardless of circumstance. The whole system isn't just unfair, it's vindictive.
CME Bitcoin futures
I suspect you're thinking of this This American Life episode:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/532/...
I know a guy who had same happen to him with Verizon wireless. He had cancelled the service but they kept billing him which he didn't see (I think he moved?).

This was when most bills were still sent in physical mails.

They sent the unpaid bills to collection agency and it was a huge hassle. He still refuses to do anything with verizon wireless.
I'm definitely not an advocate. Anytime someone asks me about smart devices/IoT, my recommendations always defaults to "generic" devices. I think we give up too much of our privacy and control to vendors - especially when there are solutions that don't require cloud servers.
Aranz Geo/ Seequent does providing you can code to
For context, read up on Obama expulsion of Russian "diplomats", and subsequent events leading up to current Mueller investigation.

To track news minute-by-minute:

https://www.memeorandum.com/m/
I misread your first line as "here's the catch." :). I feel like your second paragraph delivered on my misreading.

Do you have any numbers on that take? Or just a general feel that it works out?
That doesn't actually fix anything, it just replaces one problem with a set of worse problems. There's no good way to manage the private keys. Many borrowers will inevitably lose control of their keys, either accidentally or by hacking. Then what?
SSDs are the least likely type of drive to leave anything behind due to Background Wear Leveling. https://articles.forensicfocus.com/2012/10/23/why-ssd-drives...
Especially something as generic as .dev. I could possibly see Google having a legitimate claim to a .google TLD, but not something like .dev that is in no way limited to Google.
> large corporations take advantage of loopholes

Of course they do. They are using legal means to reduce their taxes. Why wouldn't they.

Would you decline your mortgage interest deduction, your solar energy or EV deduction, etc. so you could claim you are paying your "fair" share? Go ahead -- nothing is stopping you.
Doesn't it become exponentially more expensive to mine bitcoins? The more bitcoins there are, the more resources it costs to mine new ones?
This is actually a rather good article. It covers the subject in some detail varying points of view. Enjoyable read.
Well, and they're hardly "for-profit". The Mozilla Corporation technically is, but the Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a Non-Profit, so is forced to invest their money into their specified mission.

Therefore if the Corporation makes more money than they feel like investing, they either have to put it aside for later investments or pay it out to the Foundation, which is then legally forced to invest it.

The only real thing where they could shove money to the side is with paying their workers too high wages.
Not sure about the US but in the UK you should never pay over money to see where it goes. Paying a debt is an admission, and resets the clock on the time bar (6 years from last payment a debt is statute barred)
I’ve been involved in various Postgres roles (developer on it, consultant for it for BigCo, using it at my startup now) for around 18 years.

I’ve never in that time seen a pacemaker/corosync/etc/etc configuration go well. Ever. I have seen corrupted DBs, fail overs for no reason, etc. The worst things always happen when the failover doesn’t go according to plan and someone accidentally nukes the DB at 2am.

The lesson I’ve taken from this is it’s better to have 15-20 minutes of downtime in the unlikely event a primary goes down and run a manual failover/takeover script then it is to rely on automation. pgbouncer makes this easy enough.

That said, there was a lot of bad luck involved in this incident.
Some iPhones are manufactured with this, but again if you have paid for the hardware you care about performance on that hardware. If you have yet to buy anything then theoretical performance per $ becomes the meaningful metric.
Partially religious reasons. Also, getting a degree takes a lot of money/time, and I don't feel (from what I've heard from academia, both students and teachers) that it would benefit me much, besides being able to say I have a degree.
I tried to make it difficult, but still possible to log into them.
Remove the apps from your phone, and remove the login information from your browser. (back it up somewhere if you're the forgetful type like me)

Even though getting to the website on my phone, or putting in my credentials is fast/easy it still created a barrier to entry which wasn't there before.

Even with the barrier in place I still needed to have something else that was easier than getting over that barrier. I tried to have some form of entertainment lined up that didn't include a social media element, like something to read or watch.
Already did, no dice :/
The giant bottles require less packaging material per unit of volume, so you’re already making a better choice.
Yeah, I thought this was going to be something like Planet Money's report on Myanmar, where people value crisp new bills more because they don't have easy access to banking:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/05/10/182309623/why-...
Eh, I think what they really need are just example pages. It's fine if marketing material is aspirational, after all this person is going after real estate agents, not home buyers.
Would be great to see how a current 2 player alphago does in a straight out game vs 3 reasonable human go players. Would be even more fun if everyone was in a room !
> Making CRDTs consequence-free is ongoing research.

What do you mean by that?

I found possibly related language on this page the other day [0]:

CRDTs are "[t]ypically not suited for editing application with consequent UI."

Can you point me in the right direction? My googling got me nowhere. Thanks.

[0] https://irisate.com/collaborative-editing-solutions-round-up...
This is a very good point.

Electronic voting machines are a solution in search of a problem.
Seeded RNG.
That’s a blanket statement that has very little basis in reality. Hosted Postgres is never going to give you the performance you need for low latency deployments.
> is ReactOS going to keep up with drivers for current hardware? Of course not.

Unlike Linux, ReactOS doesn't need to: one of the design goals was to provide binary compatibility with regular Windows drivers.
>UPDATE 6/12/17, 17:12: After an eagle-eyed reader spotted that each mocked-up TripAdvisor screen shot contained the same number of reviews, we have edited the images so that the number of reviews match those in the actual screen shots and replaced two of the images.

Wait so the whole article is fake?
"invest"

You mean, pay $5? Plus it works for other stuff besides lights (we turned on a radio too).
right, so to get confirmed within 10 hours, I can set the fee to $0.19, according to this website.
Totally disagree. This wont cause a war. If Trump wanted a war he could have gone into Syria but he did not and left that battle to Russia and Iran. This announcement was the right thing to do and should have been done a long time ago.
Again, this entire article and discussion is about state-of-the-art chess. As in, literally working to "solve" the game and develop optimal strategy. I don't understand what relevance casual mobile chess games have. Computer chess is already very far beyond human capabilities, and it can't be pressed further just using mobile phone hardware (nor is that a reasonable restriction).

It'd be like in a discussion about SpaceX's BFR designs to colonize Mars, someone comes in and questions why they're using retropropulsion since the requisite control systems are infeasibly expensive for amateur model rockets. It's a completely different discussion.
Yes, there is an element of derivation since we cannot create ex nihilo, but we can infer information that is not entirely implicit in a set of data. In the case of games that AIs are dominating, this is apparent in the difference between how AIs play vs how humans play. AIs essentially memorize a gigantic move valuation table, and scan an enormous number of moves, maximizing their tactical advantage. Humans, on the other hand, have learned principles of play and how to apply these to different scenarios, so are better at a strategic level. This is why humans can evaluate a much smaller number of moves. These principles are examples of new information humans have created. In some sense, the principles pre-exist in an abstract plane, as does every idea. However, the concrete actualization of the principle in the human mind and in application is the creation of information: the mutual information between a medium (mind or matter) and the abstract idea is being increased. This general principle inference ability that humans have is not something that can be done algorithmically. Essentially, I am claiming humans are able to violate the data processing inequality.
It's interesting that today they can't even build a rocket like the SLS from already tested components in a comparable time.
> I think this is what will ultimately bring Bitcoin down

People have been saying that for years. It serves purposes other than buying and selling goods, and in fact almost no one uses it to buy things.
because other people are willing to pay more fees for their transactions to be confirmed?
New Hyperlocal Weather App with Funny GIF
That's fixed already: it's called an electric car. Get in your car in the morning and it is charged up and pre-warmed. Drive sportily but quietly and without pollution to your destination. If it's far away, plug in while eating and/or shopping. No need to stop anywhere with carcinogenic fumes and dirty pumps to pay for conflict-gasoline.
Google cache at #263: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V5owX0...
How are these transaction fee amounts even determined? With something like credit cards, PayPal, or EFT the fees are deterministic.

With Bitcoin it seems fees are both ridiculously high, plus I can't even tell what I am going to be charged?
I'm not saying they are acceptable, i'm saying that $20 fees per average transaction isn't true in all cases except once in the history of bitcoin.
Possibly much, much longer, but it could be returned in 14 days if it's too low and never makes it out of the mempool.

That's where traditional electronic payments have a huge edge -- instant, incredibly cheap guaranteed verification.
Why do cryptographers insist that "zero knowledge" on its own, WITHOUT (!!!) the words "proof" or "protocol", can't be used as a generic term to mean whatever?
Yes I can do it. But privacy and net neutrality needs to be in place for the general public who are not so tech savvy. Otherwise data gatherers will use information to destroy competition and sustain monopolies. If I make a new site that competes with some service that ATT sells, perhaps they knock on the door offering some crummy buy out deal. If I don’t accept they can just choke off the service. More likely though, they sell a choke off service to big spenders. Let’s say it’s the 90s. A scrappy website called Backrub, created by two Stanford grads, introduces a new internet search that is vastly superior to a Microsoft owned MSN Search. Microsoft pays ATT to throttle Backrub users. Fast forward back to 2017 and the world is forced to use Bing because Google doesn’t exist. I’m sorry if I created a horrific mental image for you but we need to make net neutrality the default for Joe Public otherwise this capitalist enterprise system will run itself into the ground.
Before we had to navigate our way to the other side of a open plan room in the dark to find a light switch

That's not a matter of trying them, it's whether you live in a house with a crappy installation. A switch on every entrance is a basic requirement. I agree that if you're renting, fixing those problems yourself for $50 can be useful, though.
Why Your Crypto Currency Portfolio Sucks
Perhaps if we all called a congressman and claimed he owes us money...not condoning it...
How did you make out that I said he was a conservative? I was drawing on the fact that a lot of conservative voters hold deeply misogynistic worldviews, so yeah I would lump them all into the one category, that defies politics.
And I'm saying that this 20W limitation isn't particularly meaningful, as many organizations have way more power at their disposal to throw at a problem than that. The economics of a given solution, on the other hand, is applicable at all scales.
Can anyone explain the advantages/disadvantages of using CRDTs over OT (operational transformation)?
New AR Display Nestles Digital Images into Real Life Way More Accurately
A math degree could be very useful in the remote sensing industry (this has both commercial and military uses). Processing radar and lidar data, construction of 3d representations from imagery and video sources. This has applications in agriculture, mining, medical, intelligence gathering, military intelligence, etc.

In my experiences with companies doing this work it was a healthy mix of CS, math, and physics personnel. The ones working for DoD largely preferred people with PhDs and masters degrees as they bill the government more for those people's time, but they would also provide a lot of financial aid (often 100%) for you to pursue graduate degrees for the same reason.
An example I gave to the other commentator is humans can derive principles of play in these games that AIs are currently dominating. AIs have a very different method of playing, which amounts to memorizing a near perfect tactical response table.

It seems like from a limited number of examples of A implying B, humans can infer that A always implies B, and can from there figure out A' implies C which is more favorable.
The technique you mention is realized through an FPGA chip. It is not used in the 3D-printed backscatter devices this article is about.
Oh man, this is my life. Spurious integration tests that are critical, but very complex and often times have timeouts in our test runner depending on how many builds are going in there.

I might take 1 day on the feature, and then 3 more days just getting it past the testing gauntlet
Hmm. Maybe try to contact someone at KUSC, the Los Angeles classical station. Particularly someone like Jim Svejda, who knows classical and film soundtracks inside and out. Maybe donate the reward to the station if they can id it. :-)
Monero's FUD was refuted. The privacy attack was patched and it's solid now.
It's discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182953. I don't believe it was that particular thread, but HN has been the source of some very helpful advice on how to fight this: always using registered mail (costs a bit of money, but helps you keep a paper trail of dates they can't simply deny without more proof), staying calm and collecting as much written evidence as possible, etc.
So one of the things I liked the idea of was micro payments - eg click to donate 5 cents to the author of an article. Are there any crypto currencies that work with negligible fees for micropayments? Is there a framework to use them?

Thanks
This article goes off the rails when it starts praising Airbnb. Most the arguments levied against Uber could equally apply to Airbnb.

I don't really know how you start with the premise that travel isn't a race to the bottom. If you think customers have zero loyalty toward hired cars then you haven't dealt with travel customers. Business notwithstanding, travel a typically a large expense in both money and time. Customers will aggressively shop for the lowest prices and Airbnb is just one category of alternative for customers looking to travel -- BnBAir isn't even close to their biggest threat, although the rise of meta-travel agencies does suggest that it might be in the future.

Also, hotels list on many different travel sites. Why wouldn't AirBnB hosts? It's basically zero cost for potentially more customers. Hell hosts would probably be willing to list on 10+ individual sites for all it costs them.
What other purposes is it used for?
Play by Play: Moving the NYT Games Platform to GCP with Zero Downtime
So a 20% transaction fee on a $10 transaction? Who pays that fee?
Show HN: Fluid-react CSS free solution for React styling
I think the usual argument is that the decoder is a small fraction of the total transistor count in a high-performance core.

For microcontroller class HW, the x86 ISA might be a crippling disadvantage compared to RISC-V. For a high-performance core, which AFAIK is something like 20-30 million transistors, not so much. The bigger the core, the smaller the advantage of the ISA.

But yes, I don't there is any reason why RISC-V couldn't be used to create a high-performance core competitive with the x86, POWER, ARM of the day. It's just a hugely expensive affair.
Meanwhile, Visa is about 1.5-2% plus $0.10 flat interchange. To break even with BTC against Visa, we're talking an average transaction of over $200. That's not feasible for the vast majority of merchants.

Not to mention that the currency's extreme volatility means that when you sell it to convert it to greenbacks (the currency your investors actually care about) it probably won't be the same amount you were paid for.
Bug found!

The terms of service are way (really, way!) too complicated for such a simple product.

(And, by the way, there must be a million other free services which allow one to put some images and text on the web, so why choose this one? The landing page should really explain that. And it should include some demos at least.)
No, what they are saying is that pictures that look like TripAdvisor screenshots in the article are not real screenshots of TripAdvisor site, but mockups re-created by the author. I guess this is for copyright reasons, since TripAdvisor could plausibly claim copyright on the actual content of the site, and given that the author is messing with them, it's best not to be legally exposed.
The foot/egg shot nearly made me spew my beverage onto my monitor from laughing.
Evolving my open source project from a one man repository to an OSS organisation
That's land in the middle of nowhere. If you're near a city you can get a nice premium as the suburbs expand. 4x is a bit extreme (been a long time since it was that much). But it's expensive.

In the middle of nowhere there have been quite a number of land sales with $10k+/acre in the past handful of years.

Farmland prices have been kinda crazy over the last 5-10 years.

As a quick example of some math:

* Rent prices for farmland in Iowa [1] averaged $230/acre in 2016

* Yield per acre for corn is 203 in 2016

* Price per bushel averaged $9.27 [3]

Throwing averages into the mix, $1,882 revenue per acre. Without any expenses, farmers could be looking at >5 year time to break even at a 10k purchase price as opposed. Tons of farmers are paper millionaires simply because of the land they own. 100 acres of 10k land gets you there. 640 acres is 1 square mile (much of the state is on a 1x1 mile grid of gravel roads).

And of course I found most of the work already done after I found a bunch of sources. [4] has some more detailed numbers.

[1] http://dreamdirt.com/blog/2017-iowa-farmland-cash-rent-rates...

[2] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a1-12.pdf

[3] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a2-11.pdf

[4] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a1-20.pdf
Is it worst there then in other gameDev companis?
I enjoy reading Pro Publica. Their policy analysis in the linked article is interesting and reasonably accurate. The like the original article above, it describes flooding in terms of mitigation efforts. The dams above Houston manage stormwater but cannot prevent flooding.

It's easy to look at Port Arthur, TX and think "Yep, of course that's going to flood." It's hard to look at Houston and think the same thing. The difference is a matter of frequency and relative extent not possibility.

Bad policy makes the effects of floods more costly.But good policy does not prevent floods.
Android Auto support was a key feature in my last auto purchase. It's very handy for dealing with phone calls and text messages. Less good for handling audio apps. AA has a 6-tap limit to prevent too much "browsing" while driving and voice support is sketchy for the audio apps. I'm probably less safe as I try to navigate around the tap limit or just pick up my phone and select a playlist.
Other than "feeling good" you can't derive personal benefit from a deductible donation.
>I could write in my own name since my opinions are closer to my opinions than the Green candidate. What would that accomplish?

I don't think I have the political knowledge or general knowledge to represent my interests best in government, and failing to campaign shows I'm not prepared for the responsibility. I can't say for certain, but I assume it's the same for you. If I'm wrong, you should vote for yourself. I imagine most candidates do.

Yes, some better form of representation is part of my ultimate goal. The fear of small parties having a disproportionate influence doesn't worry me, small groups already have a disproportionate influence.
When a payment processing system doesn't promptly cancel auth holds, customers definitely complain about being prevented from spending their money. This stuff should be table stakes but some retail banks are just way behind.
Thousands of users in India use WhatsApp on cheap phones via Browserling