skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right on Tesla and WeWork, but not on Uber.

Uber doesn't buy and own the car, which means it requires much less capital. This small change has many implications, and the tech helps solves many of the problems that come up.

I am not saying it is properly valued (over or under or whatever). Just that given the choice between an Uber (or Lyft or yourlocalapp.com) or a cab company with the same fleet, customers, and revenue, I would consider the Uber version more valuable.
So then, go with price controls. We have multiple examples of that working just fine. The answer cannot be that we make people responsible for payment before telling them what the price will be, and it's unsurprising that by doing that, we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world.
Since you got a lot of good advice already, I would like to add following.

Hire or make deals with, people who can speed things up, developers, designers, sales people. You can't do everything by yourself. Find people you can talk to, that is super important.

Often people trick themselves into building elaborate product first, but also there is a case where you genuinely have to make something before you can sell it.
Like the sound of this!!
1. It's really hard to tell if any of the people writing blog posts about these things have ever experienced the larger scale monorepos or not for any length of time.

As best I can tell, the answer is "no", and they are mostly writing based on perception. They don't appear to even do things like "try to talk to people who have experienced the good and bad of it".

While the writing is fun, it makes it a lot less useful in both directions, IMHO.

2. The author is right that planning more than 6 months for smaller scale companies makes no sense.
However, both of these authors seem to fundamentally miss the actual problem in large companies, which they assume is around engineering and scaling large systems. In fact, it is not. The underlying issue is that engineering a thing is no longer your main cost.
This is one of many reasons larger teams/companies are fundamentally different (as this author does correctly point out).

There are 2080 work hours in a year.

If i have 8000 developers, and I have to spend an hour teaching them a new thing, i just spent ~4 people for a year.

If you spend a day teaching them something new, I just spent ~31 people for a year.

If you spend a work week teaching them something new, I just spent ~154 people for a year.

That's just the basic learning costs, it doesn't include migration costs for code base or anything else[1].

But these costs certainly dominate the cost to engineer a solution as you get larger - the systems being talked about here (which have scaled engineering wise) are not 50 people a year (i work next to them :P). Not even close.

In some sense, talking about the engineering challenges makes no sense - they basically don't matter to the overall cost at large scale.

These same things apply to most of the broader (in the sense of who it touches) pieces of developer infrastructure like programming languages, etc.

As you can also imagine, you can't stand still, and so you will pay costs here, and need to be able to amortize these costs over the longer term.
In turn, this means you have to plan much longer term, because you want to pay these costs over a 5-10 year scale, not a 1 year scale.

[1] It also excludes the net benefits, but you still pay the costs in actual time even if you get the benefits in actual time as well :)

Also, productivity benefits from new developer infrastructure are wildly overestimated in practice. Studies I've seen basically show people perceive a lot of benefit that either doesn't pan out or doesn't translate into real time saved. So at best you may get happiness, which while great, doesn't pay down your cost here ;)
Glad you wrote this and saved me the effort, pretty much what I was thinking of jotting down
"after startup cost" is the elephant in the room.
[this](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...) estimates a price of 59.31$ / MWh for the proposed DEMO2 fusion reactor. 34 $ of this is depreciation, ie construction cost.

Wind power is currently at 20$ / MWh..
I really wish Anker would ship a charger that can power a MBP 15" 2018. I use Anker for everything charging/battery/cable related except my third party MBP chargers (because they don't make one) and 90 degree cables (again, because they don't make them. If not my boyfriend would slowly destroy every cable I have by resting his phone on his chest while charging...)
Hi,
author here.

Thanks for your message.

Please submit your podcasts on https://github.com/adblockradio/available-models
Hi - yes I am soon. Just got side tracked with holidays etc. I'm also in the middle of trying to find a buyer for my other side business. Flippa produces a lot of interest, not sure how many are just tire kickers though.
Well amazon didn't achieve what is did staying a bookstore.
Agreed. I believe a lot of people have beef with online advertising primarily because of the programmatic nature of it, which hurts user privacy and site UX by causing the page content to jump around, not to mention loading new ads if the page stays open,.

But, I don't have issues with podcasts where they work directly with a company to pitch a product. It's old school and it isn't as impersonal and cash-grabby as a junky website with an Adsense account.

I can imagine a tool like this becoming necessary when Amazon/Google start piping in ads through their home speaker products.

We just can't have nice things, I guess.
Toptal is taking 50-100% of your rate as commissions according to my estimations. Do you think it's reasonable?
Yeah I never understood why many people, at least among programmers, seem to be strongly opposed towards shell and shell scripts.

At some point when I wasn't proficient enough in Bash yet, I was writing scripts for automation using Perl and Ruby. The 'logic part' is definitely much easier in these languages. But simple file/directory stuff is far more complex actually. A lot of this has to do with error handling and different expectations how that is supposed to work. In a default shell script, errors are handled very forgivingly which is very much how most people work when performing tasks manually - not every step is super important.

On the other hand Shell scripting documentation is crap. Most of it is from 80s/90s, full of irrelevant details for the practical person. A bit like 90s/00s JS documentation before MDN.
Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10
Several thousand repos - ye gads! How do you document them? How do they fit together? Do they reference each other?
That is colossally stupid statement, Toyota, Volvo and the big oems have been pushing ADAS features and safety since day 1, with the next logical step being this guardian type of system. Are you saying a company that builds 10 million cars a year has zero incentive to work on active safety?
The ultimate question of business is about deciding between alternatives and asking which is best for the company:

1) If I carry on with the product, can I keep quality and speed to improve sales significantly or will I quickly hit a wall which will cause my customers to leave?
2) If I find a good founder instead, will they help me with stuff I am not good at and give me the space to keep quality and speed or is it a distraction?
I feel like this angle is massively overplayed in articles about autonomous vehicles.

Is automation paradox a real issue? Absolutely. But at present, all the evidence seems to indicate that the people automated cars will save far outnumber the people they will kill.

Focusing on the dangers is alarmist and misleading. The 737 crash is a good example really - I've never heard anyone with experience in the field suggest anything other than that the automation makes planes safer. Focusing instead on the fact that the automation isn't perfectly safe only makes sense if you're a media company looking to scare people.
My experience is that it takes several thousand hours to make an engineer, so it has to be more than a bootcamp in order to work, but in theory, sure, I see the angle.
> Nothing pisses me off quite like the time waste that is podcast advertising.

Why would you be more willing to pay to an app developer who will shut down the revenue stream for the content creator, than to listen to the ads and therefore fund the content creator?
> And spoken ads (hopefully) are not tracking me

While I understand that there is value in physically locating you as you play it, but the fact that the spoken ad got onto your podcast means that you are in some way located, right? I've gotten area (ie. ISP that don't exist anywhere else) specific messages in my podcasts.

I guess they don't get as much usage data as lot of other apps, unless the playback app shares it.
Even the 2B might be just to preserve the value of their earlier invested money ?
37signals sold 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1. They put out a press release that they were now valued at $100 billion.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...
Working at a theme park doing technology work, it allows for free access to the theme park (significant other included) and other theme parks in the area. Deep discounts are provided on merchandise and hotels in the area.
> Most of the people who think so are being very stupid.

VCs make a profit by selling startups to big corporations or big investors via IPO. Most startups have negative cash flow and make negative profits by the time they are acquired by a corporation or investors.
This means that VCs make a profit by creating negative value. Most VC-funded startups with a successful exit never become profitable.
Those few startups that do manage to IPO and eventually become profitable are usually those who happen to have a monopoly over some industry; in other words, they are only profitable because consumers have no other alternatives to choose from; so they get to set the price.
Believing that VCs create negative value is not stupid. Not seeing that it might be the case is what's stupid.
This makes very little sense to me. They haven't "changed the way we work", they've just stuck an attractive brand on shared office space. Every city in the UK has at least one Regus building where you can rent managed office space on short term leases, they just don't also throw in copious amounts of free drink and an atmosphere more like a college party than a workspace.
10 Tools to Power Up Your Command Line
There is no such thing as "intrinsic meaning", and I think you might be confusing "human language" and "english-like". There is astonishing variation in human language.
Probably not a bad idea for SoftBank... even this headline is funny, Sotbank has decided against a _ludicrously large_ investment in favor of a _still very large_ one
Since I'm clueless on the subject, can I ask how you determined that information and what resource I could use to become better informed?
Completely agree. I use multiple ad- and tracker-blocking browser extensions, but mostly due to the tracking.
Incidentally, while blocking ads online can be noticed by the serving party (to e.g. display an annoying warning) those behind the goods/services being verbally advertised are none the wiser.

> There are ways to overlay inaudible tones

Are you referencing prior work or was that hypothetical? There is actual prior work on this.
They were able to engineer a POC that could trigger "Hey Siri" and "OK Google" inaudibly by broadcasting it with ultrasound on a harmonic of the correct frequency, but at a pitch inaudible to humans [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf
Hah, thanks. I knew the idea wasn't original to the person who told it to me, but was too lazy to look up the original source. Maybe I should get around to reading it...
>Uber doesn't buy and own the car, which means it requires much less capital.

I don't think this is true with one of the major things they have been selling investors for years: self-driving cars. That certainly requires a lot of capital to pull off, and I think they plan is they would own those cars.
Good advice, obviously, but there are different types of practice. I was always grateful that, amongst other things, my (wider) research group had weekly meetings with talks, mostly from students who were all expected to do it to get practice and friendly feedback. The next level up was a national conference, where you got the chance to do a short talk in a sympathetic atmosphere, where it was frowned on to be hard on students. It was common to rehearse talks for major meetings in front of the group too for comments.

I've been horrified on occasion subsequently to see students thrown in completely cold to give important talks, including at major international meetings.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript ;-O
I think Impossible (even v1.0) is more meat-like, but I actually like Beyond better. I like the ever so slightly stiffer chew and legume undertone. When I go to my favorite Seattle burger place (Lunchbox Lab) I go for the Beyond version and it's awesome.

It's great that there are meatless options almost indistinguishable from real meat. It's also great that there are tasty options which resemble meat only slightly. And everything in between. The more the merrier.
Show HN: How to Test Your React App with Confidence
You have too many CMakeFiles. I'm sure you can just simply them all into a single CMakeFile at the top level.
Ask HN: Is a master in statistics worth it for Data Science?
I am currently a computer engineer student about to finish my degree.

I did an internship and some classes related to Data Science and it is a field I've grown to be quite interested in.

Currently I'm debating whether to pursue a Master's degree in statistics for data science or to enroll in a more practically oriented program.

I feel like my technical skills are more than sufficient for working in Data Science, and during my internship I felt like I needed more knowledge in statistics, of which my degree only had one or two classes. I also feel statistics and math are more difficult to self-learn than whatever tools or frameworks you end up needing on the job.

At the same time, I'm not sure if it makes more sense to pursue the practical-oriented master's degree, since I don't know how often you need to apply advanced statistical concepts in real life work, and perhaps I would be best served by having more experience with the current technologies.

What do you recommend?

Some notes for consideration: I live in Europe so arguments regarding the money investment are not so relevant since it would probably end up being free for me.

Also, the time investment would be just 1 year for both master's.
I love that product design. It's not since the Cray 2 and the CM-2 that I see such a striking piece of big iron.
On the same line, let me recommend you a book: "The Design of the Unix Operating System," by Maurice J. Bach. If I am not mistaken, Mr. Bach was a member at Bell Labs.

My personal take on the book is that the kernel was meant to be a portable virtual machine, extensible through processes, and that those would be the building blocks of user applications for which the shell would act as glue.

In other words, the shell and the OS are separate because most of what we commonly call "the OS" may be interpreted as mere encapsulation of less versatile hardware architectures.
The ads might not track you, but you might be tracked when downloading the podcast and the included ads might be personalized. I've noticed that the ads in certain podcasts are completely different when downloaded from a different location while traveling.
Is your coach open to more clients?
This sounds great, until you realize you still have to memorize a bunch of stuff. Random foreign words are never going to be "intuitive" to you. Neither is whatever "covalent" and "ionic". Though, sure - it's far better to understand the logic for things where it's possible.
A success in that it has transformed the public image of the worlds largest and effectively "only" internet ad platform into one of a benevolent tech company working on problems that will help the world.

How much has that goodwill improved profitability? What were people going to do, revolt and use Bing?
And what is there go-to market strategy? Most cars that people can buy today have active safety features as an option or in the case of Toyota, a standard in all of their cars. How is google technology, which is so advanced, mitigating crashes and fatalities today?
Show HN: A guessing game for historical events / people
I like ads on podcasts: not invasive, support the shows and can't put malwares on my pc. Honestly I find an adblock for podcasts a total dick move (outside of the intellectual exercise part of course).
Who's in the wrong - the scraper, obviously. Why would you think LinkedIn would be on the hook - it's not like their "Delete Profile" button can wipe Google's/Internet Archives[1] cache.

1. I haven't read their robots.txt, but nothing I've read in GDPR remotely suggests "Right to be forgotten" features that attempt to erase data internet-wide.
It's not about who is responsible. If I had evidence to back my claim up, regardless of who made the initial assertion, I'm going to.

My guess is that neither can find anything with a quick google search and are just hoping that this thread dies.
For anyone stuck on integration, here are some nice materials for problem solving strategies, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED214787.pdf
I'm sure there are certain types of crashes that can be avoided in that way, but I trust a collision avoidance system to make that judgement far more than I trust a human driver who was only half paying attention to the road five seconds ago.
The interesting thing about this is that the listener already isn't likely to be a converted customer from the ad anyway, and these podcast ads are recorded in place for forever (and as such are usually, in my experience, a fix cost and not variable like ad images). So, it doesn't seem likely that the creator is making "less" as you imply, at least not immediately.
The impact of changes across an ecosystem can also be checked in other ways. See for example how Rust checks the whole cargo ecosystem for problems caused by compiler changes.
Off topic, but what to do if your cofounder is not doing anything and contributed financially but stopped there? Worse if the service has not taken off yet. Feel really demotivated right now while cofounder seems to have checked out.
I guess the right question is, was a basket containing Amazon.com, pets.com and all the rest overvalued? Amazon is up about 15X since its peak before the crash, the dow is at 3X over the same period.

So as long as AMZN was >= 20% of your basket, then it was fairly valued. Sounds about right.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I know what you refer to, as I worked in SF recently for several years. I don't think it is true that white men are unilaterally demonized by any significant group in American culture today. There is obviously some of that occurring, and occasionally the behavior is a bit troubling, but I don't there is any major problem to worry about. The behavior you are concerned will go away naturally as the recent social movements mature and are able to see some of the progress they are making. In general, most people don't support the extreme behavior, so there is only limited space for it to survive.

I do think patient and healthy pushback can be appropriate in the right circumstances. It is a tricky issue though. There are some very legitimate (and some less so) reasons motivating such behavior, even if, occasionally, some of the specific actions themselves are troubling. Anyone claiming rigid, simplistic absolute statements here seems wrong to me.

Perhaps I'm biased towards (and privileged enough to do so) being patient with what I see as some temporary flare ups that are side effects of attempting to process and rectify some of the results of absolutely terrible historical occurrences over the past several hundred years. I don't know. We will see how the next 10 or 20 years go.

I have to go so I won't address the other issues. These topics are tricky and hard to discuss with a short comment.

I will say that the way you are discussing them is preferable to the person I accused of straw-manning. You seem more capable of considering nuance, which I appreciate.
Pleased, but not surprised, to see the thought and effort Tong puts into communicating ideas. His notes on Quantum Field Theory are still an excellent go-to introduction for masters students and sheds light on a number of otherwise tricky to pin down ideas and topics. And, somehow, makes them seem comprehensible and straightforward for the must part.

As for this, the bit about never going over time is incredibly valuable advice, and one I /still/ see regularly ignored, often flagrantly, in Physics seminars.
Re 2.

I like this with the second interpretation mentioned on the page. Avoid boring (v.) other people, rather than avoid people who you seem to be boring (adj).
What? This sounds profound but it's not true. Luxury goods are still status symbols, positions of authority are still status symbols. The universal status symbol is your net worth and anything that can display a high net worth is a status symbol.

A Flexible schedule is not a status symbol. Let's be real. The people with the highest status in our world today aren't high status because of a flexible schedule. They are high status because of wealth and power. This is universal to human nature and will never change.
The Oath of Maimonides
What is the difference in cost between an 8000-person org all spending a week learning something new, and 800 10-person orgs all spending a week learning something new? it's the same fraction of availalbe time

Large orgs have more resources (revenue) and more costs. What matters is whether revenue:cost ratio is superlinear or sublinear in org size.
> what are other viable revenue sources for content creators besides ads?

I don't mind paying content creators directly. I do mind allowing them to commodify parts of my mind.
Strategies for Tackling Uncertainty with Apostrophe’s Kathy Keating
For example Stanford CS is not ABET accredited, or nationally accredited at all. Do people get turned away for having a Stanford degree because ABET haven't rubber stamped it?
Aniracetam
I require random drug testing at work will aniracetam come up as a false positive or make me fail in anyway? And how long does it take until its out of your urine?
What if wind/solar + inefficient storage, conversion losses still turn out to be cheaper than fusion? I'm all for doing fusion research, but fusion might be a completely uneconomical solution to the energy problem.
Never pushed the investigation but I had managed to remember several poems and songs verbatim using this method. Something that I otherwise really struggle with.
Tips to Create Buttery Bokeh Effect in Photography
I switched to fish around 2010-2011, and I have never looked back. I’ve never had to set anything else besides my personal functions. These days it’s even faster and much more stable, and I’ve had so much more practice that I know all keyboard shortcuts and understand a lot of its inner workings.
I never said that. For simple, non-symbolic languages gmp is still the best.

Lisp is of course better, optimizing expressions symbolically as far as possible, eg. to rationals, and using bignum and bigint's internally. As exact as possible.
perl6 does it too, just 100x slower.
Cruise is owned by GM, Tesla has a decent level 2 system but only sells ~100,000 cars a year, and waymo has zero technology in consumers hands at this point. Also most of the automakers have offices and research facilities in SV, with hundreds of engineers working in them.

What lunch are they eating?
Eddie Lampert is a monster.