skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What data are you basing the statement that Google's brand is in decline on?

Granted I'm by no means saying Google's messaging strategy is optimal, but it's not totally bonkers.

And the adage "you aren't the user" seems apt here. This applies both to the statement that Google's messaging tools are in decline, and to the statement that Google's brand is.

HN has been decrying google for years now, but he isn't your average consumer. Much as my extended family can all use allo and duo with ease, but I doubt my grandparents know what irc is.

I kind of think that it's difficult if not impossible to appeal to the broader set of people whole also appealing to the hn crowd. And, well, we're a lot smaller.

To loop back to your post, thats part of why data is so important. If you don't base your decisions, at least in part, on data, you end up designing a tool that's useful for you and not for your users. That's not to say that emotion has no place, but I think you're being disingenuous towards data here.

(Note:I work at Google, if that matters)
This was my guess, before reading the article.

A couple secondary hypotheses come to mind. First, resistance to monoclonal antibody based drugs[0] is more likely than resistance to vaccines. Second, resistance to single-epitope vaccines is more likely than resistance to complex multi-epitope vaccines.

0) https://www.medicinenet.com/monoclonal_antibodies/article.ht...
Place Kit – The future of augmented reality mobile apps
A nationalized 5G network will be essential for high-bandwidth applications like V2V across level 5 autonomous vehicles. As has been done in the past for large scale projects like GPS, LEDs, photovoltaics, and nuclear (just to name a few!) which private companies wouldn't be able to eat the long-term capex against. These technologies are also licensed either for free or very cheaply to companies in order to benefit the public at large since we've already paid for the R&D with tax dollars.

In order to prepare for the future of the digital economy at large, bandwidth shouldn't be an artificial limitation of it. Once all the associated RFCs for 5G are standardized, a rollout of this scale would most definitely pay for itself and more over the network's useful lifetime.
Eh, if it cost $1250 per household to light up every home in the country, you can bet metro folks would be carping about how much they are paying to cover the much higher per-household costs of rural users.
In search of a sacred combe, a writer’s refuge
Challenges administered via pair programming can be useful if your team/company operates predominantly in that mode. If most of your actual day-to-day work is done individually, though, I think your challenge should mirror that reality.

Interviewing all candidates in a pair programming setting risks weeding out all the people who are great at the job, but get anxious in a paired interview scenario.

A job interview is already pretty stressful and anxiety inducing. Adding somebody looking over your shoulder while you type into that mix can be really rough on some people.
If you're talking about knowing the direction of prices, which is what everyone really cares about, then both laymen and Wall Street start out on almost equally bad footing - they can each have only small predictive edge at best at best in a highly probabilistic game. So a smart and disciplined investor can do as well as or better than wall street mostly by avoiding dumb mistakes.
Hm, reminds me of Bodega.
Ask HN: Who is running a profitable productized service business?
Hey guys,

I am a non-technical entrepreneur interested in building startups.

During my studies I grew a profitable, $250k/year productized service business (an online letting agency for international students) and I am now doing the same but for design services ($12.5k/month in revenue currently)

I was wondering if any other HN'ers are running a productized service business or if you know any examples. In addition, I would love to hear your thoughts on the future of productized service business in the era of automation / AI and whether we have a chance of serving on the long term!

Thanks!
P not equal to NP
The Weird True Story of the Rise and Fall of the Waterbed
> Instead of valuing work, you can value outcomes

Recently, I unexpectedly came to this position. The development team at our startup has been operating with a number of fluid arrangements--the only constant being pair programming. The last rearrangement produced mostly full-stack programming pairs. When you develop something from end-to-absolute-end, it is excruciatingly obvious when spending more time than value delivered.

I've often stopped mid-implementation, to take a short-cut which was not originally seen. It's also easier to balance the weight of tech debt and other factors. Whenever a decision is made on one of these, a comment is very appropriate. Eventually developing goes from a 'feel good' (comfort) activity to feeling 'right'--striking a good balance of factors.
For wireless carriers, the three highest opex costs are 1. Real estate (lease costs, no one owns their cell sites) 2. backhaul, which today means fiber 3. employees

Nationalizing the 5G roll out will not help with any of these costs, the real estate costs are more and more coming from local municipalities or other local entities to place in the right of way which is probably the only realistic option with the densities needed for 5G. The Federal government does not have the power to take those rights of way. This constraint applied really to two of the big items, real estate costs for the cell sites and right of way for the fiber.

The reason countries like China or others like it can more easily deploy a nationalized network is because the central government has total dominion. We don't have that system here so a federal approach will not reduce costs, if anything it will cause them to spiral as local entities will see that as a cash register from the federal side.

And we all understand that a federal work force is not going to be a low cost option for the third component of the equation.

For these reasons I disagree with a federal approach. To my way of thinking, if local entities, cities and counties, want 5G wireless broadband, the best way is to make rights of way available to carriers in a fair and accessible way without trying to over play their hand and jack the costs up which inevitably will just price it out of reach of more and more people.

The capital outlay to deploy these networks is fairly significant and by making a reasonable accommodation for the carriers will help offset that.

The federal government is not a good answer here as much as it may seem like the quick and easy answer. All it takes is a quick review of recent performance of congress to realize how unrealistic that notion is.
You mean like what happened to the web ?
I'm a bit tired that every time someone suggests a new regulation/standard on HN, someone feel smandated to explain why regulations are bad and why neo liberalism is awesome.

Could we assume that we all understand the downside of regulations ? but that we still suggest some when the market fall into a bad optimum (bad for the consumer).
If you don't agree that the market is stuck in a bad place, fine you can argue that.
The article comes from https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/07/health/safe-injection-sites-s..., which has the better title but also an autoplaying video, so we'll use the title but stick with this URL.
> So if you’re enforcing unique email addresses, or using email addresses as a user identifier, you need to be aware of this and you probably need to strip all dot characters from the local-part, along with + and any text after it, before doing your uniqueness check. Currently django-registration doesn’t do this, but I have plans to add it in the 3.x series.

Please don't "normalize" email addresses like this. Not all mail systems are Gmail, and many do treat "john.doe@example.com" and "johndoe@example.com" as different identities. And even if we are talking about Gmail - it's not your identity system's job to deduplicate different logical addresses for the same physical inbox.
I completely agree with your criticism but I disagree with your conclusion.

The fact that some applicants will spend ridiculous amounts of time on a challenge is a critical flaw. It doesn't mean that take-home challenges are worthless, though. It just means they need a functional mechanism to enforce time limits equally on all candidates.
I agree with everything here except the email addresses example. Yes I do want to register igor@example.com and igor+work@example.com. Those are different accounts, please don’t mess with that.
>> Containers are just a better tool for writing OS configuration scripts. (If your team is full of Chef experts then it's not "better" for your team, but for a lot of teams it is).

No, not really. You could argue that dockerfiles are part image provisioning script and part process environment specification, but I think you'd still be missing the main advantage. Dependency isolation is the thing that usually gets touted, but that's only part of the picture. After all you can isolate dependencies now by baking images. That works great, it's well proven and reliable. But the vm that runs a single boot image can potentially run dozens of different containers, and using an orchestration platform you can easily and quickly shift those loads around, scale up and down, reconfigure and redeploy, all with far less overhead then deploying an image to a vm requires. Containers didn't become a popular tool because they don't add value. The use case for them has been clear for over four years now.
I expect that l5 autonomous vehicles will be able to function without any internet connection.

I'd be afraid if my car required cell service to function.
Maybe they ran an A/B test :)
You aren't really getting 100% wind power since the grid doesn't work like that. You are, however, promoting more wind energy into the grid.
There are several startups in China doing that. BingoBox has a very similar setup.[1] Wheels, too. Bodega had a similar concept for the US, but at vending machine size, not shipping container size. The optimum size for these things isn't clear yet. It does make possible a convenience store too small to justify a full time employee.

Amazon will probably combine these with Amazon lockers and take over the industry in the US. If the convenience store doesn't have it, you'll be able to order anything Amazon stocks delivered to a locker.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYN3gozk4fo
For code documentation, that's definitely true, but you need places to document processes, designs, and other things like that.
Capitalism is great because it’s been the best tool we’ve had to massively improve quality of life in many different areas of life. That doesn’t mean it’s the only tool we have and/or it should be an end in itself.

The situation where capitalism is not the best tool for the job we should abandon it for that job. That will not only mean we have a better standard of living, but will also mean the idea of capitalism gets stronger because it doesn’t suffer from negative backlash when it fails because it is used in situations where it isn’t the right tool because of ideology.

There is possibly an analogy here to programmers who insist a certain technology be used everywhere, even where it isn’t a good fit, instead of opting for the best tool for the specific application.
Vue is the php of JS frameworks. Feeling a bit ironic for using it, I'm also a user of php, and it just feels right.
> cost of less than NZ$1,000 each!

Yes, of course the net cost per household is low when you count 100% of households. Of course you can only do that if you have a military to force people to buy your product whether they want it or not. Other than that it is a perfectly wonderful business model.
You have described mutual funds. See the Mutual Funds section of [0].

[0] http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money
Check out Buildkite. You manage a vm and run their agent, their website is to view and manage builds and so forth.
From my experience in my friends that have pursued math degrees is that the job market is extremely competitive to become a professor. You either attempt to cash out in finance after learning how to code or start working for the local community college. Even if you do try to get a tenured track position you will be an assistant professor or worse unless you do everything perfectly.
The 401k was a way for companies to stop providing pensions to their employees.
I have some friends in Stockholm who have bought electric cargo-bikes, and they love them. They're perfect for the "I'm just going to pop down to the store", or "I'm dropping the kids off at daycare" situations.

So one funny offshoot of batteries getting better for electric cars, is that they're now small enough and powerful enough for bikes.
> So if you’re enforcing unique email addresses, or using email addresses as a user identifier, you need to be aware of this and you probably need to strip all dot characters from the local-part, along with + and any text after it, before doing your uniqueness check. Currently django-registration doesn’t do this, but I have plans to add it in the 3.x series.

Isn't this a really dangerous game to play? Just because some major MTA's assign a class of addresses to each user doesn't make each member of that class not a unique identifier in general. Is it worth the headache to maintain a list of various email systems' policies rather than just treating them all as unique?
Capitalism isn’t all or nothing and government expenditure on infrastructure isn’t incompatible with capitalism.

There are certain markets (telecom, healthcare, mass transportation) where completely “free markets” don’t exist, because they can’t exist, because the nature of the products and consumers are such that one or both violate the criteria for which a free market can exist (lack of perfect information, no competition, etc.)

The free market can not create a national telecom network because it can not force all people to pay into it, which is necessary in order to have it built in the first place. The only reason we have the internet as we do is because AT&T was mandated by the government to install phone lines to everyone, everywhere, and charge everyone a fee for decades to pay for it. By its very nature there is no competition and no choice. The old Bell System was a government sanctioned and funded monopoly and no free market would have ever created such a network by itself because that’s not what free markets do. They simply allocate capital effectively in markets which are compatible with the criteria necessary for that kind of allocation to be possible.
Jet Airways to double cargo capacity on Bengaluru-Singapore route after start of
With the impending mass cheapening expense of launching satellites via SpaceX and the like, wouldn’t a large array of telecommunication satellites be a more reasonable option for nation wide coverage in a country the size and density of the United States?
What Nabokov saw in his dreams
> The Federal government does not have the power to take those rights of way

This wouldn't be a discussion if they didn't.
In general I find them to be completely unrealistic if you're trying to find anyone good.

Someone really good will already have a full time job, a limited number of "sick days" to use for interviewing and is probably somewhere in the interview process with at least 3 other companies -- probably closer to 5 or 7. Then they might have family responsibilities on top of that.

I budget 4, maybe 6 hours if I really like you, on any company in the application process -- tops. Almost 100% of this time is taken up by interviews. You want me to give your company a whole weekend of my time on some chance that you might hire me? In addition to hours of interviews? That already tells me that I don't want to work for you -- especially if I haven't at least interviewed with 3 technical people already. It's one of the clearest negative signals I know of.

If I work 13 days in a row without a day off, I'm going to be a crabby asshole at my job and probably blow all of my other interviews until I recuperate. Your company isn't worth that.
That inherently biases the interview process away from people that have additional commitments in life. You're going to end up preferentially treating those that are currently unemployed versus people that have jobs, for example.

Also, you're likely to be homogenizing your applicant base. Expect to see many more young people and recent grads versus people with kids.
Indeed, a friend of mine worked at a small college during the school year, but every summer, she had a grant to sit in a library and transcribe old European texts from microfilms. The project was just to take a huge pile of texts and get the first several lines of each one into a searchable database. Full transcription was a hoped-for future goal.
> Minimal code delta means the isolation of any bugs is much easier than if you have to read through six months of patches.

That's going from one extreme to the other.

Just because you don't release every build that passes automated testing doesn't mean you wait six months between prod deployments.
The most Republican Libertarian TV station on cable is Rural Free Delivery TV named after the United States connecting farmers with free rural delivery. They now hide the history of where the name came from.
> Tests prove no such thing. Best practices aren't about output, they are about inputs. Tests determine if the expected output is the real output

Testing in and of itself is best practices. Having familiarity with and a strong understanding of how and what to test is extremely important for any modern development cycle.

> Again, no they don't. I can test unreadable, unmaintainable dirty and unclear code.

Except it's significantly more difficult.

> No it doesn't. It shows that it's an arbitrary take home assignment that already took a week and they don't want to use yet another library to generate data for it

If you don't have a strong dummy data suite to test against, then you're not testing properly. This actually justifies exactly what I'm talking about.

> Honestly, you put so much emphasis on testing which is odd, because it's the easiest, most mundane thing to write. It provides nothing but "busy" work and fails to test the most important aspect of any candidate: can they problem solve.

If it's mundane and easy then it should just be done. What I've found is that most can't.

If the candidate pool was small, then I'd take less of an issue to it. But if 50 people come in and they can all problem solve, then I'm going to become more interested in who can solve problems elegantly.
> Why is this everyone's go to when trying to discount someone about stocks?

You're reading my comment wrong then. You made a very assertive conclusion with zero precedence or sources to back the claim up. Without that it's simply conjecture. So I'll have to ask again...is your position on this so strong that you're willing to put money down? If not, then, uh, show us evidence, maybe? Otherwise, it's more helpful to a discussion to state it is an opinion, rather than as a truth.
In Michigan I could see this being quite successful in rural towns, quite a few lack a convenience store and might be a fifteen mile drive or longer from a full supermarket.

I am doubtful this would work in inner city Detroit at all.
Optimizely presumably has no incentive to compete with Google Optimize for free users: https://www.google.com/analytics/optimize/ .
> Here is a great example of where it is completely insane: Facebook. There is absolutely no good reason for that website to have usernames for regular users, and they frankly shouldn't have usernames for businesses either.

Uh, Facebook doesn't have usernames, and haven't had usernames for as long as I've been able to be a member.

There's an option to grab a unique identifier for your personal page, so that you become https://www.facebook.com/identifier, but it's completely optional, it's just a vanity thing.

Same for groups, they can grab a unique identifier, or stick to their auto-generated id.

Same for businesses.
To emphasize your point: don't touch email addresses. You can get away with doing equality checks on NFKC case folding, but don't assume that you can store a lowercased email address and have it work properly.

Lots of weird email systems exist. Don't assume that everybody works like gmail. And do test that things work right with uppercase letters in email addresses: I've been locked out of systems before because I use an uppercase letter in my email address and one half of the system was trying to match the lower cased version to the actual text.
CAN YOU SOLVE IT? How to kill a plant without touching it?
How one cargo ship delay sends ripples through Alaska’s food supply chain
The most likely reason is that they have contractual agreements about how easy it is to be able to get at the data by unauthorized parties (read "the person watching the video") for various resolutions.

For example, their contracts could say that for 1080p the playback mechanism has to guarantee security all the way to screen (e.g no playback over digital video cables that don't support the requisite encryption primitives). Generally this requires support from the OS and hardware, and the relevant playback application using the relevant OS functionality.

This is why you get 1080p in IE and Safari, but Safari only on OS X 10.0.3 or later. You get 4K in Edge. You get 1080p on ChromeOS (where things are locked down in ways that prevent the viewer from exfiltrating data), but not in Chrome.

Similarly, last I checked, you could get higher resolution videos from the iTunes store on iOS or Apple TV than you could on desktop MacOS, because the latter is not as locked-down. That was a few years ago, though.
He Predicted the Fake News Crisis Now He's Worried About Information Apocalypse
Sounds too good to be true!
I'll check that.
I also employ the dot scheme for different purposes. Example: johndoe.hn@gmail.com vs johndoe.school@gmail.com so I wouldn’t want anyone aliases without the dot.
interstate commerce clause has lead to federal government passing sweetheart legislation for wireless operators, severely limiting local control over the placement of micro-sites like the kind needed for 5g. https://www.fcc.gov/general/tower-and-antenna-siting

Huge federal overreach.
> it's not your identity system's job to deduplicate different logical addresses for the same physical inbox.

The problem is that then you're adding potential attack vectors to every single web app just to cater to the .01% of email clients that insist on implementing the email RFC exactly to spec. Not deduplicating email addresses creates an attack surface for both hard-to-spot technical issues and also social engineering attacks. E.g. what if your ESP at some point adds deduplication on their end, either mistakenly or on purpose, then suddenly you're sending password reset requests to the wrong users.

I think you should normalize email addresses to enforce account uniqueness, both for security purposes and usability, as long as you also store a second copy of the email address exactly as the user entered it and only send email to the latter version.
SplitOptimizer.com is a very cheap a/b testing tool. It’s not as full featured as optimized but it works perfectly.