skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for all the suggestions.

Unfortunately zsh and fish are more bloated than bash, and dash and ksh are missing the features I use.

I've just found "yash" which looks like a nice compromise. I'm going to give that a try.
In Chicago a Costco membership is worth it just for the gas. It's usually at least 50 cents per gallon less expensive than nearby stations. I have no idea how they do that.

Also, for new parents: you can easily save the cost of the membership on diapers and wipes for the year or so your child wears them.

They always have a car parked in front or by the customer service center to advertise their auto purchase program. It has almost always been a Lexus, but for the past few months the one near me is a Maserati. I think this may be their signal on who their ideal customer is. Yet my parents used it to buy a Subaru and it was a good deal.
> This is like saying that if all other things are equal, a restaurant that pays more for its ingredients will lose business to competitors that pay less.

Well, isn’t that one also true? There are limits and exceptions, obviously, but yeah, I’m pretty sure there is a strong correlation between the cost (cheapness) of ingredients and total sales.
Counter-example for basically everything you said: Trader Joe's.

Sears used to be like Trader Joe's: customer service was great, the best products were the house brands, and if you weren't satisfied, you walked back in and got a new one or a refund.

Then Sears' new management went off in pursuit of higher profits and killed everything.
Single founder here. I think this doesn't work in B2B or may be I am talking to the wrong people, most of the potential customers I've spoken to want to see something - so the first question they ask is what have you built. This is in financial industry, building fraud product and like I said I may not know the right people to talk to. I think having domain contacts in B2B works great, specifically if you have somewhat tried to solve the problem before. I think PG writes this in one of the essays.
I don't know about the OP, but I would.

The advertising industry has repeatedly shown itself to be sleazy and underhanded and willing to throw everybody under the bus to make money for themselves. Spam, malware, pop-up ads, tracking cookies, extra loud volume commercials, etc. They can't go out of business fast enough, IMO.

You probably wouldn't defend a pay-day loan business, so why defend advertisers?
So what I'm hearing is "so big they had to fail".
When the local Sears was about to close up shop, the kids they hired to help with the closing were playing Marco Polo over the store intercom. Eventually the person in charge came over the intercom and told them to cut it out. Was the only thing I enjoyed while in that store at the time.
If I understand you correctly, you're advocating for creating an MVP before moving on to the questions of how to manage the business around it.
How not to pay taxes: don't sell anything.

It's a foolproof plan really.
> Unless you're in a niche that people are willing to pay a margin for or serve upscale customers who also don't mind paying margins (Costco, Whole Foods, Nordstroms, Apple, etc)

Is it fair to lump Costco in with these other companies as an example of places where consumers don't mind paying higher margins?

From a quick google search on gross profit margins:

- Costco: 13%

- Nordstrom: 38%

- Apple: 38%

- Costco: 33%

Costco's is also likely skewed due to their house brand where they likely make a much higher margin than the name brands
Pets went out of business trying to ship heavy dog food for free. But today the logistics for that actually exists. Often it doesn't pay to be too early. If you are too early you need more cash to stick around until you are proven right. Webvan was another example, today food shipping businesses are everywhere (whether they make money or not one can argue) but back then they were too early and tried too hard before the logistics worked.
> but if you need the machine just to help maintain your lane for you...you probably should not be driving

This is not actually an argument against putting lane keeping assist functionality into cars. Yes, distracted driving is bad. But there's no way to completely prevent it, so the auto industry should do everything they can to mitigate the harm.
Erasing Persistent Storage Securely on Linux
True love is about being selfish first
In theory, sure. In practice, consumers end up pinned on old/outdated versions of the libraries they depend on, because upgrading is hard, and they often lack a specific incentive to stay on top of the most recent version of each library.

The "consumers are responsible for library upgrades" approach, also requires every single consumer team to become knowledgeable about changes between library versions, rather than having one specialized team or individual that can stay on top of it and do the work for the whole organization.
Eight Odd Details Hidden in Masterpieces
This was the reason I asked. I’ve known of people using food stamps there.
It's not revisionist. The problem is identifying which ones will survive ex ante. Given 100 assets to invest in, if you knew that one of them would become amazon in 20 years, but the other 99 would die, how do you value them? Well, you value all 100 at 1/100th the expected value of Amazon. Now, maybe you look at each individual company and try to pick a winner to put all your arrows behind, but assuming you can't reliably do that (which is a reasonable assumption), you would want to value all 100 at quite a bit more than they currently appear to be worth.
> Sears' customer service has been terrible for a couple decades, but [...] was great in its heyday.

Wouldn't "worse customer service" be the change that allowed other retailers to eat Sears' lunch, then? You say Sears' clientele were not willing to pay a premium for whatever extra Sears was offering, but by your own words they haven't actually offered anything premium for a long time.

More expensive and better is a viable value prop; more expensive and worse is not.
I tend to take the understand-don't-memorize approach to stuff as well. It's served me well in general, but it's also why I nearly failed micro-biology in high school.
I did mean compiling remotely. We're thinking of having shared MacOS runners on GitLab.com for this.

I didn't realize the problem of also needed a simulator. Let me think about this.
The motivations are strong here. You want your database to be as sane as possible.

But this will make some features really hard, if you need them. Pagination based on sorted values subject to collation wouldn't be queryable, you would need to either get all the data and sort it, or query for a key and the sorted column, sort and then query for details on the displayed items.

Selecting a range would also be potentially difficult.
PostgreSQL should use its own internationalization library, or ICU, but not the C library's I18N components. This would allow PG to ensure that any one version of PG also uses the same version of Unicode.
> If you cant grind it out and sell, the core of entrepreneurship, then maybe its not for you

Yes, I think it's the no 1 reason I saw solopreneneur friends fail. Most are just not willing to put the hours in. I see that people really like to dream and make big plans but sitting down consistently after work each day and actually working on all the mundane small things is a necessity many are not willing to do. The idea/business might still fail but without actually doing anything you have lost already.
This, this is actual hacking. Absolutely useless, and not at all the correct tool for the job, but exceedingly clever. Shame I can't get the code to work for me on Debian.
> I think this is especially relevant here on HN because it shows how startups are required to solve problems. For many problems, a behemoth company has no reason to improve, and a lean startup can rush to a solution faster in many cases.

Pretty much. Jurvetson calls it the luxury of being a new entrant. It's very hard to steer the Titanic away from an iceberg.
Sooo.... that's a maybe?
The trustee in bankruptcy could sell that debt to a collection agency.
KaiOS has 50M users heading toward 100M. This is the lineal descendant of FirefoxOS and shows that the latter failed only due to Mozilla leadership failures. Blaming it for weakness within Firefox or non-OS platform teams is self-refuting.
Avatar as graphics benchmark: SLers show how they've evolved over the years
No problem. I know that a large number of major publishers use WordPress as their primary web publishing platform, so I recommend studying some of their UX to meet some general industry standards, but also recommend learning from their mistakes.

The other commenter (jude-) explained more about the stack, which helped to make more sense of it. I had in mind a system more like IPFS.
The thing I most remember is the surprise of intransitive collation order. I also recall implementing case insensitive lookup.

It might have been an early version of this one: http://codecentral.embarcadero.com/Item/15171 - from 2001 - but I've written quite a few hash tables over the years, and may be blending the different recollections. I never used Vista, and I'm pretty sure my experience predated Windows 7.

I also wrote JclStrHashMap to support JclExprEval: https://github.com/project-jedi/jcl/blob/master/jcl/source/c...

I also wrote the Delphi runtime library TDictionary generic implementation, but that was more recent.

Update I found it: original discussion, from newsgroups, has been ported to the web: http://www.delphigroups.info/2/62/478610.html

It was from 2004, so more like 15 years ago. It's mildly painful to read myself from back then too :)
Solved - anyone with the same issue with Twilio, check out setting geo permissions on https://www.twilio.com/console/sms/settings/geo-permissions
This seems a remarkably wholesome article given how vicious showbiz can be around song writing rights, recording deals etc. There's no discussion of the actual management of these acts - people like Peter Grant/Led Zeppelin or Mike Jeffery/Jimi Hendrix Experience, who both had very questionable business practices.
Those are the people who control and exploit the talent, it seems very few acts have management who are looking out for them...
Your other comments contradict themselves.

Comparing the poor of a rich nation to everyone else is an apples to oranges comparison. The poop still struggle hard in the US.
Linkedin has been an issue for years for me, because they simply disclosed your email to anyone connected. This enables some people and/or corporations to scrap profiles and build spam email databases. After being annoyed about this, I started to change my linkedin dedicated email address frequently, 4-5 times a year. The conclusion was obvious: less than a few days after the change, I began receiving spam and proposals on this new dedicated email address, thus confirming the email scraping problem.

Yesterday I went back to Linkedin to reconfigure a new email address, and found that the account settings now incorporate a setting to hide your email address to anyone (inactive by default...). I've enabled it and changed again to a new dedicated email address, to see if it is true. I hope this time Linkedin did things right.
Yup, he spent $6b in stock buybacks and raided the company for assets. Not saying anyone could have saved the company, but with $6b someone could have given it a real shot.
Ask HN: Tools for checking my knowledge?
Hi y'all,

Do you know what tools or services exist for me to test my knowledge of certain programming languages? I am confident in my C++ and Python, but am always looking for holes in my understanding, and also for staying sharp.

I regularly do interview problems + side projects but this focuses on more on algorithmic and problem solving skills, and not necessary language features.

For example, the Triplebyte quizzes for specific languages, but I'm unsure if I can take that without being contacted by recruiters.

Thanks!
Amazon hasn't been just a retail company in a very long time. It is probably THE Tech company at this point. They are a consumer electronics company having cornered the market on the cheap android tablet, and the smart speaker. They are a dominant enterprise cloud player. They own the biggest player in e-sports currently with twitch. They are in the music and video streaming business. They do government contracting at this point. The valuation is more than justified.
It’s unsurprising job-hopping is so common these days. Sometimes it’s the most practical way to get a long (granted, unpaid) vacation and come back to a raise and a new environment.
The United States government is not the "global community." Paying taxes to the US government does little to combat death and starvation in third world countries. Maybe we can think of some good reasons for Google to contribute to American society, but starvation in third world countries is a red herring.
This was helpful, thanks. I have to admit ignorance when it come to how Blockstack works. I had imagined it was more similar to how IPFS/similar systems functioned, where distributed permanence is a major goal.
Good thread, found it really interesting!

I am processing some research on DICK's Sporting Goods, 750 stores and 90% are their core brand. I knew the reality was something along these lines but just didn't expect the % to be so small: "The Company's eCommerce sales penetration to total net sales has increased from 2.8% in fiscal 2010 to 10.3% in fiscal 2015."[1]

It's certainly growing every year for them, easy to see since it's a public company, but not at a tremendous rate like my news bubble or profession would have me believe. It furthers your point that brick & mortar are certainly not dead, or even dying, since many people still shop in-store.

Of note, a good portion of their 10k was devoted to omni-channel experience, which is the thinking that customers are customers and not defined by online or offline alone--they use both. Omni-channel strategies seem pretty basic at this point but also well worth their investment.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1089063/000108906316...
1) This is mostly dependent on language and the rules available. In our case python is a mess regarding 2/3 compatibility and external dependencies. There is a roadmap being executed on to fix these issues. Regarding our transition, it was slow at first as we pulled in services and tackled some tech debt. We wrote a handful of custom rules that helped. Bazel does have the ability to import repositories and that can be used as a little bit of a crutch in the process.

2. Exactly the same process except there is a single pr instead of multiple across multiple repositories.

One of our challenges was integrating one of our public repos into our repo and that is more of a difference in release patterns(semantic versioning vs nightlies). We use copybara to help with this problem.

- https://github.com/google/copybara
Yubico announces the first Lightning security key for iPhones
You're usually better off starting with people you have relationships with -- SaaS owners that fit the bill. And depending on the relationship, you can see if THEY have relationships with others that might be interested and leave an open invitation to get in touch with you.

Have you parsed out your own target audience at all? Have you made a list of SaaS companies you would like to approach? Are you attempting to reach them through cold email? What have you tried that's not working, or are you having trouble segmenting your audience in general?
Here's my favorite comment, which I believe deserves status as a law of the internet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
Firefox from what I gathered will be used as the de facto browser in in-VR web browsing. If you read the VIVE promotion article on VIVE homepage you'd know that they are planning a kind of VR metaverse as an interface to the games you play - instead of picking an option from a flat surface you'll "walk" into the app/game. But of course this doesn't change the facts that web is flat so any in-app or in-game web will be displayed in some fashion using the Firefox Reality engine.
I imagine so. https://robincangie.me/
The question was about censorship, not dedecentralization. That the author still has a copy is irrelevant.

Here more about GitHub suffering from state-censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub

GitHub also censors any content that they deem stolen (such as the NSA Malware / EquationGroup releases) and content that they deem containing PII-data (such as the public LinkedIn crawl of people stating they work for ICE).
Yes, debt collection is big business and someone will happily buy your balance for the privilege of getting you to pay it to them.
Sure but the Great Depression and squandered fortunes are extreme examples. The median in the US is being completely hammered without any extreme circumstance at play.
https://robincangie.me/
> My company is bootstrapped. It isn't growing fast enough to fit PG's definition of a startup, but it's 5 years old and makes 7 figures.

Very impressive. Thanks for sharing! Is this https://interviewcake.com?
I imagine the database would use versioned collation, so a fixed bug would have to be opted-into by whomever owns the tables, no?
Direct3D team office has a Wall of GPU History
Show HN: Generate x86 Assembly with Go
If you pay a premium for labor, you need to deliver operational excellence.

I worked for a company in high school whose philosophy was to pay 150% of the local average for retail/foodservice work. They did this because they worked you 2-3x harder, and their operational framework was able to turn that into money.

Many places are designed to be on some scale of mediocrity because it's hard to the excellent. I ran into a Walmart cashier who couldn't identify broccoli the other day. That's evidence that a warm body that doesn't walk off with the till is what they hire for.
People on food stamps can buy in bulk since they get a bulk distribution once a month but the $50 membership is likely a deal breaker for them.
If that were true wealth wouldn't becoming more concentrated. People love to jump to population as an issue, but in most cases it's not a problem. On a global scale there's still more than enough to go around.
That’s impressive. The purchase price and running cost are high. Then there are expensive labour costs (doctor, probably 2x techs and admin/reception staff. Often a nurse is around for more complex procedure too). Peripheral equipment isn’t cheap, with defib, contract injectors, RIS/PACS, reporting stations etc.
Scans are slow relative to CT and x-ray so I have no idea how they make that work. Did you pay the whole bill?
I am an MR tech.
> First, to send bitumen through a pipeline, a diluent to make the bitumen flow more easily must be added, and that diluent is often 30 percent or more of the volume traveling through the pipeline

My first that was that even though this seems like a good idea there's no way oil companies would go for the added expense, but I didn't realize there was so much additive already needed when oil is sent through a pipeline.

> That said, Auld was explicit that a solution like CanaPux probably wouldn't work for anything but the heaviest of crudes. "The heavier your crude oil is, the less polymer you need [to make CanaPux] and the more diluent you need" to send that oil through a pipeline, Auld said. In those specific cases, the economics favor CanaPux. Lighter crudes, on the other hand, flow through pipelines much easier and would need a lot more polymer additive to be made into solid form.
I honestly thought they were gone already.
Net worth, versus annual income.

Shopping at Costco is often a wise financial decision, and hence people who shop at Costco tend to be the type of people who make wise financial decisions, and the net result of making wise financial decisions is a higher net worth.
Slept on it, thought about it more, and visited this thread again for the other comments.

Peter, your comment demonstrates the type of stigma that supports ignorance and prevents progress.

I thank you for your perspective as I will make a note to avoid others who share it when looking for work, friends, and a community.

Your presence in this thread was unhelpful and only served to demonstrate the ignorance I encounter in this industry.

I came here for help and you took that as an opportunity to passively judge and make a statement. Additionally, you ignored the majority of what I originally posted.
Include me in the same boat, but that was many years before I learned value investing and fundamentally analysis of equities. One of which is gross margin analysis.

Amazon, despite losing money, had very competitive gross margins from day one. I think pets.com was literally losing money on every product they sold (but don’t quote me), which is not sustainable.
> Imagine if by virtue of running for office your personal cell could be called all hours of the night?

If you take constituent calls in the middle of the night directly to your personal cell, just not from specific constituents whose views you don't agree with, then that should be considered inappropriate. If you don't take constituent calls directly to your personal cell and you only take constituent calls during business hours, then you are fine on 1st amendment grounds.
Also given the failures of crypto so far I don't see any evidence that a programmable money/securities revolution would come from crypto. I would bet that a conventional tech company (think a PayPal/Robinhood hybrid) could do it much better.
It would seem the site suffers from hug of death.
Sure, that makes sense. I think whether we pick something up intuitively or not has a lot to do with our past experience and level of pure intellect. To me, being able to quickly internalize new things and cut to the complexities/challenges of those subjects is the basis of genius.
Likewise for weightlifting hook-grip, which squashes your thumbs against the bar's knurling.
Someone from WeWork recently told me they are a digital experiences company and not a real estate company.

Did you ask them what this meant, or did the conversation effectively die there? I'd be curious to hear straight from the horse's mouth what the horse thinks 'digital experiences company' means.
The photo for "There is a restaurant in Los Angeles called Brunch Near Me, presumably to trick Googlers." is showing Brooklyn, not Los Angeles. I don't know if this restaurant is in LA or in Brooklyn.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55576406e4b02e4679105...
That's Sheepshead Bay near Coney Island in Brooklyn.
We haven't had any issues regarding stability. For the most part we extend by creating additional rules. Many of these are supported by the community(search for bazel and rules_* and you should get a bunch of results on github).
Wouldn’t an unused membership be worse (for Costco) than a used membership? Perhaps barring some rare edge cases like customers who would only buy loss leaders, or stores that are congested with shoppers.
Another sounds too good to be true because of just that. there are only the feel good details in the article and not the nitty gritty that is needed to even make it plausible.

so, with regards to not paying it back if they don't land a job. how long are they held to that commitment? do we also look to see if they have another means of support? five years, ten, twenty?

with regards to not paying up front, perhaps if we cross that one taboo. not every degree is worth its cost and many not worth having money risked to obtain them.

but the big reason education is expensive is because government is free with loaning the money but not putting restrictions on what colleges can charge per course hour nor what those hours encompass. treat it like medicare/medicaid where the government sets the rates per course credit and you can guarantee colleges will fall over themselves to get that government money and loans
I wonder if Amazon will ever get to that point. It's hard to imagine.