skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Zoom is interesting. They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel, they just made a product that works better than the competition

I'm VERY convinced that listening to your customers and doing it WELL is a massive competitive advantage.

I've been building an app for the last six months and have been listening to our customers pretty aggressively:

https://getpolarized.io/

Lots of HN users use Polar so smart crowd.

Part of it has been to build in tools that allow me to manage all the information and to collect as much as possible.

Analytics on everything the user does (but respect their privacy). We're interested in exceptions and things like that...

One our big wins has been to integrate net promoter score and to build out a few tools to analyze the data.

Cohort analysis is also key.

I've been really focused on this and we're gaining about 1% additional retention per week over the last 2 months so this has been great to see it slowly climbing.
The title is pretty inaccurate, perhaps they updated it since this was posted?

"Amazon will no longer sell Chinese goods in China"
This design does not do well at CPU parallelism for many workloads. Consider texture sampling in rasterization, to name just one example, in which shared memory is extremely important to get good performance.
You think they don’t have a dedicated team just to try to build moat? That’s the whole challenge of a highly visible company like this, build moat, high switching costs etc
We're a fully remote team so I haven't used Zoom rooms, that does seem like something of a moat if widely deployed in a company.
Your apnea could be undertreated, or it could be a symptom of a bigger problem. Epiglottic collapse is not uncommon in apnea patinets (10-15% of cases), and is not treatable by positive pressure, as it is an inspiratory valve.

CPAP only works on the expiratory valve - which is your soft palate.

If you are having a large number of arousals, despite optimal CPAP pressure, and your respiratory waveform is jagged in certain ways (hard to describe in text) - you are very likely having epiglottic collapses.

However, epiglottic collapse can only be definitively diagnosed by sleep endoscopy.

Epiglottic collapse can only be treated surgicially.
But then you are an Engineer.

I love engineering, but physics is often theoretical to the point that its useless for macro application.

I imagine an Engineering Physics is an Engineer.
Motor Story, Polaroid SX70
Appreciated. I don't blog or tweet because HN already has the best possible readership, and the voting system means people only see my good ones. :)
Eggsavier's Cackleberry Rescue – A New Game for Atari Lynx
I agree that gov't is relatively good at sending checks (except in some economic circumstances, e.g. when the currency it prints is no more in demand - like in Venezuela, or late USSR). However it doesn't necessary make a particular welfare program efficient in general. Maybe recipients are poorly determined (which happens more often with larger programs), or sending checks is not the best idea at all.
Depends on where...

I have family in southern/central Ohio and, while they've always been a risk, there has been a marked uptick in the occurrence of tornadoes. Xenia, OH very famously has been hit multiple times by serious tornadoes. Where my parents are, where I did most of my growing up, in southeastern Ohio, is a little safer because of the Appalachian foothills, but I fondly remember the tornado sirens blaring every Wednesday at noon during the spring, summer, and fall.

A friend of mine from high school, who is a meteorologist and storm chaser today, was telling me the last time that we spoke that tornado alley is potentially / actually shifting eastward over time. I haven't tried to verify what he was saying, because I trust him given his career choices, but it does seem to bear out from the anecdata that I have available.
NOLA brings in $8 billion a year in tourist money alone. The metropolitan region had a GDP of $235 billion in 2017. Investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity seems like a smart investment.

Maybe the people of 2018 are just better at math than the ones in in 1956.
Hey, I share the project but I'm not the author, I just think it's pretty cool too
What does Web Bluetooth have to do with IoT? Bluetooth is a short range, low-bandwidth protocol for 1:1 pairing of devices, isn't it?

That aside, Google's approach to introducing experimental APIs like Web Audio, Web USB, Web Bluetooth etc has been... less than ideal. Having been involved in it, I don't think it's surprising that other vendors are not interested in helping.
I lost my ability to focus for ~6 months.

I started working on something that I cared about.

Slowly, over 3-4 months, I regained it.
“Among Hispanic Americans, church membership dropped from 68% to 45% since 2000, a much bigger decline than for non-Hispanic white and black Americans”

Well that’s really bad news for the Vatican if it spreads south of the border.
Do you work with kratom businesses?
About US B1/B2 visas. A startup I knew was selected into Blackbox connect. 3 people appeared for an interview, only 1 was selected. The rejected ones reappeared, 1 was selected from them. The final one decided not to go.

Recently had something similar happen to me with an Australian visa. I've been to the US before, and a few other countries too.

Applied for a short-stay specialist visa because a client of mine wanted services in-person after I'd built their product. That's exactly what the visa was designed for. I provided evidence of funds, a letter from the client, travel history, everything. I was given BS reasons about:

- Not having ties to my home country. My entire family lives here.

- Not owning property in my home country. I do, they never asked on the application for proof, and so none was provided.

- The economic disparity between my own country and Australia being too high. I showed my current employment letters, and proof that I run a successful company, in total making significantly more money than the average Australian in my position.

My point is: the decision to grant or deny your visa is made by a single person. A cog in a great bureaucratic system that is empowered by their sovereign national law to judge your application and make an informed decision. But ultimately, the system is designed and operated by primates that learnt to strike two rocks together and make fire a few millenniums ago. They're highly flawed, there's no need to take it to heart. Just optimize your application in accordance with their laws, and reapply if you really want to go. You'll get in eventually. It took this dude 8 freaking tries, but even he managed.
The sign refers to the direction that the vector points relative to the particle's spin vector. The proton's magnetic moment is positive, meaning it points in the same direction as the proton's spin. The neutron's magnetic moment is negative, meaning it points in the opposite direction to the neutron's spin.
Check the "Arduino" tabs on the WebThings Framework homepage [0]. See also the Supported Hardware list [1], which includes ESP8266, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi (among many others).

[0] https://iot.mozilla.org/framework/

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Supported-Hardware
I think these count as huge (although maybe not when next to Google), but Spotify and Netflix.
Yikes!

Former USSR component States are just......horrific.

The literature of the culture is not very happy ending-ish.

Interesting to see happiness in US females, a very solid and consistent lifelong upward trend after bottoming out in the late 20’s, early 30’s.

Vast difference from Western European women, almost a mirror opposite.

Western European men are almost a lifelong flatline.

I wonder why that is?

From some reason I’m left with a random thought along the lines of “egalitarianism of happiness” for Western European males.
A Daily Coding Challenge in JavaScript
Compile-Time Dependency Injection with Go Cloud's Wire (2018)
Would that even meet the USB spec? You could isolate the entire USB module, but I don't think you can just isolate the data lines.

And you'd still have to deal with the big spikes coming in on the USB power pins.
I don't think that it was a joke or made in bad faith - rather to demonstrate the logical extreme.

Essentially that the logical extreme of dropping computer-destroying USBs to demonstrate that one shouldn't plug strange USBs in the first place is akin to destroying an office that you talked yourself into to prove that you shouldn't have been let in in the first place. Perhaps "shooting up" was a tad too far, but with charity it's a reasonable point nonetheless.
"Doubt it" is pretty much a clear invitation to present arguments. But you are welcome to present some sarcasm instead, even if very general.
This is one of the places where “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face” applies.
I'm guessing he's a rich kid from India, with rich parents who are bankrolling his education.

I hope he gets the full 10 years. Nothing like the US Penitentiary System to teach you a lesson.
Sorry, my bad. I didn't realize the design can be even more horrible like that.
Does one need to be present to open a business account if they're a foreigner?

As an example, Silicon Valley Bank doesn't require physical presence when opening an account via Stripe Atlas.
Guaranteed that there are no consequences greater than a slap on the wrist.
*You're
Do physics students have to learn about electrical components?

In Chemical Engineering, I had to take 2 electrical classes and I learned what math I needed and what components exist.
The above list makes sense for people outside of tech. People in tech have most of the above in US. Some countries in Europe have pretty competitive comp like Switzerland (Denmark, Norway have decent comp too but its getting destroyed by high taxes)
1. Black-Scholes works in a lot of cases but is an approximation: it has edge cases where it does not fare well...

2. Likewise Newtonian physics is also an approximation: it does not fare well near relativistic speeds or high gravity. But at least we have models which seem to be accurate to many decimal places today. Who knows what the future may hold.

3. Not all useful problems can be represented by simple equations, but they can be computed analytically (e.g. N-body problem).

4. Ultimately DL is popular because it works better than anything else in some very specific domains like speech recognition and image recognition. It is overapplied I'll admit, but if you can do better then feel free to publish a paper.
Maybe its just the tone of the headline but it seems antiquated. Are we implying billionaires can only come from america? Or if america blesses their presence?
I am very happy I choose to work on my own projects than peruse a PhD.

Anecdotes like yours from my peers were very helpful in making this decision.

Not to mention, both teachers seemed like they wanted me to pay to do their work.
It’s called actuary science, and it turns out to be so good overall that a nearly trillion dollar business model runs quite well on it.
I’m very familiar with that research. I read “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn and “Drive” by Dan Pink, and they both cite the same studies and make the same arguments.

I was already operating like you are when I was an employee. (I wrote another blog post about it.) I had already mentally ignored all rewards and extrinsic motivators and just focused on doing the best work I can (something fully in my control).

I believe there is a nuance you’re not seeing when you say “... doing something for a living means you expect to be rewarded for it. According to the study, if you do something that intrinsically rewards you, you will eventually lose motivation to do it when you expect to be rewarded for it.” The intent is what matters. You lose intrinsic motivation if you do something for the reward. But you don’t lose it if you do it for its own sake. Running & growing a business is something that I believe I’m intrinsically motivated to do. The money from that activity is not the same type of reward (dangling of a carrot) that the research you cited talks about. The books I mentioned talk about why that happens: the carrot & stick approach feel manipulative to whoever is subject to then, which in turn cause loss of interest and lack of cooperation. When working for myself I won’t be subjected to any of that.
Can't reply to 'highlyskilledimm's' comment below, hence adding here.

Not sure if level 4* h1b's fall under highly skilled, here are a few wondering why they get RFE for their visa extensions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/h1b/comments/bdt5o8

[*Level 4 is the highest wage category for h1b.]
I've seen startups with zero AI (beyond rule based algorithms) call their product AI because it attracts investors. So I can vouch for that.
Do you have or can you add real check and ACH withdrawal security? I want my bank to decline all externally initiated withdrawals unless explicitly authorized. In other words, when I write a check, I want to tell my bank, and if someone tries to cash a check drawn on my account, I want it to be rejected. The same should go for ACH debits.

This might be harder, but it would be even better if unrecognized debits we’re out of hold for a day or two so I could approve or reject them.
Police officer told me it’s $12-$20/dose of meth. Didn’t verify.
I'm sure they do, I just don't see what it is yet.
Besides finding it more reliable in general than alternatives I've tried, Zoom is the only conference software I've found that allows me to share my screen on Linux.
This is the Feds we’re talking about here, not our sainted Orleans Parish Levee board
I remember reading about this and liked what I saw, so believe me when I say this is coming from a supporter, but...

Why? Why here? Stop that! You could have made your point without the plug and humblebrag.
Australia has little tech industry to speak of and software engineers aren't terribly respected or well-compensated. The US is a much better bet for technologists.
Because DL isn't great at NLP (and may never solve "real conversations" aka AGI), it's worthless?

It's the best performing tool we have for NLP, image recognition, etc. Is it a local maxima? Probably. But it's out there solving real problems nonetheless. We'll capture all the gains we can and then move on after.
What would it Look like with all the planets between the earth and the moon?
He could have just bought entry on H-5 with a $500K investment in "Harlem".
Zoom is like what WebEx would have been in an alternate universe without Cisco acquiring them.
Thank you for injecting some sanity into the conversation.

The NPV of the region is such that the cost of the levees would have to increase 3 orders of magnitude before most of the comments that amount to “let it flood” would even begin to make any sense economically, despite being entirely morally bankrupt to begin with.
Peccavi. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:18440518-Peccavi_Pun...
Hard facts are hard facts. If New Orleans is going to be under water in 4 years, they will have to do something about it.

Actually, we should probably treat New Orleans as a case study and learn from it since due to rising sea levels, a lot of cities may have to evacuate in 10-20 years.
US via system rewards fraud and promotes lying.

Every student who comes to F1 needs to lie that they have no intention of staying back in USA. They can't say I will try to get a job and H1B. But that is what they do.
Google meet works for me on Chrome, also, appear.in works great on Firefox.
I liked the suggestion of logging known password to detect leaks
> They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel

This just shows a lack understanding. They did something extremely novel: actually make the software work the way humans need it to. HN trivializing anything it doesn't understand gets tiring.

Eric Yuan was the founding engineer of WebEx where he stayed for 14 years, even after the acquisition by Cisco.

He left Cisco to finish what he started at WebEx because he knew Cisco wasn't doing what needed to be done and it was clear that every other piece of video conferencing software out there was terrible too.

Talk to people who've evaluated the software in the market today and anyone who's tried all of the conferencing solutions will tell you that Zoom is head and shoulder above the rest, including Google Hangouts.

Here's a choice quote from an interview he gave:

"I got to this point in life by never giving up on my inspiration — which has always been to build a video communications solution that people will love. This has been a long-time passion of mine. I was born in mainland China. I first envisioned Zoom while I was a college student in China in the late ‘80s, and would take over 10-hour (each way) train rides to visit my girlfriend (now my wife). My desire for an easier way to see her face-to-face without the arduous travel became the impetus for my long path from student to entrepreneur. In 1997 I immigrated to San Jose, CA and secured a position as one of the founding engineers at a small start-up called Webex. I stayed with Webex for the next 14 years, and proudly grew the team I managed from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide, and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. In speaking with Webex customers, I realized that the solution suffered from some deep flaws due to its older architecture, particularly a lack of usability, reliability, and video quality. Simply put, it was hard to use and it didn’t work. I knew that Cisco needed to rebuild Webex from the ground up – from the back-end architecture to the user interface to the sales model. I told Cisco leadership, but they didn’t listen. I struck out on my own in 2011, and, fortunately, dozens of Webex’s most talented and visionary engineers soon joined me. Together we spent the next two years building Zoom 1.0, a unified video and web conferencing software that ran seamlessly across mobile, desktop devices, and conference room systems. Since then we’ve developed the product into the best video communications software in the world and built a global team of over 1,100 passionate people."

Full interview here: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/tips-from-the-top-one-on-on...
Just to clarify, I didn't mean to imply that this is Bing's secrete sauce. But if it runs at this scale, but it's probably extremely robust and optimized software.
Actually it depends on what risk it is. Sure, I’m risking a lot of money (my savings), time, and career growth opportunities. But I actually don’t think I’m risking anything consequential. If this doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I can always go get a job again that makes ends meet. It doesn’t have to be the same job with the same income. My family’s standard of living is not really at risk with this experiment I’m doing with my career. I’m quite risk averse, but I’m careful to separate what is really worth protecting aggressively from what I can be free to speculate with.
Tornados cut a narrow swath, compared to a hurricane. I’d wager all the tornados in the last 100 years cause less total economic damage than a single hurricane hitting a coastal city.
This. It feels like spam
Also, it seems likely that the protector could peel off accidentally during ordinary use, even by users who know not to remove it.
If you're trying to mitm, you want a hidden agent that isn't easily recongizable and takes up little space.
I work at a startup that uses machine learning for medical purposes (junior position). My biased impression is that the interest in this tech is growing rapidly and not even IBM can ruin it. IBMs problems might be good in a sense if it leads hospital networks to experiment more with the offerings of up-and-coming companies with more reliable offerings.
> Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere.

OK, I gather that means fall 2019. If that were going to happen, I'd have expected some drop-off in 2018 harvests. And I don't see news about that.

But let's see what happens this year.

> They see social collapse leading to immediate meltdowns of nuclear power stations and thus human extinction being a near-term phenomenon. Certainly not more than five years from now.

That's still possible, I guess. But it too seems like a worst possible case.

But whatever, I'll be happy if the next decade or two is ~OK.
Are YOU trolling? I'm not, and I suspect that you are.

Dark patterns in Windows 10 were used to get people to upgrade, and the exec behind those decisions was let go.

What exactly constitutes "excessive data collection" to you? If you are saying "telemetry" then turn off all of your computers and devices forever, because they ALL do it. Microsoft is simply more open about actually doing it than most places.

Bill Gates has donated more money to charity than anyone in history, and through that charity work has certainly saved more lives than you or me.

Just admit that you like disliking Microsoft and that your opinion isn't based on anything real.
LOL your parents were sadistic.
sure, it's a complex situation, and IT is booming, so the "high salary + throw money at it" approach works great for individuals
TDD Changed My Life
Zoom deserves the huge pop for adding the "touch up face" feature to the desktop app. I can look fresh for meetings even if I'm running haggard from taking care of an infant. :)

Seriously though, that's one of those small features that shows real love and care was put in the product. I was skeptical of Zoom when I switched to it but it quickly became my favorite video conferencing software by a mile.
I know about it from the Raptor PC team and their Foss compatible microcode. Would you say it holds its own performance/reliablilty wise with competitors?
Psychology videos of change blindness and inattention blindness are fun. For instance, Simons and Levin's "door" study swaps conversation partners in the midst of their getting directions. Swaps of similar people are less likely to be noticed, but sometimes even very dissimilar (different gender and race and height) swaps aren't. Though to be fair, there's often a misdirection task and/or object.

This evening there was someone seemingly "stalking" around on the subway. Perhaps plainclothes, or crook, or artist, or just someone a bit unusual. Getting off, and pondering the ethics of mentioning it, I realized it was a non issue, as I couldn't give a useful description of someone I'd been puzzled by for several minutes. Later, walking down the street, looking at someone, looking away and generating a description, and then looking back to check it... it's clearly not a skill I've developed.
With Article 13, GDPR, VATMOSS and other things I heard complained about from small businesses, I wouldn't want to start a company in the EU. At most I would hire employees there to work remotely.
I know sarcasm never goes well on hn, but perhaps it's time we stop 'giving' the government $14b dollars... ?
I was talking to someone from Google who works on Bazel things, and he brought an interesting point: flaky tests are asymmetric in that they don't provide much value when they fail (since you don't know if the failure was due to flakiness), but they do provide a lot of value when they pass (because they presumable test something non-trivial.)

With this in mind, what Bazel does when a test is marked flaky is run it several times. This is a simple way of minimizing the effect of flakiness while still getting confidence from green tests.
Like it was a bureaucratic nightmare or it wasn't properly implemented?
In the startup world there is a lot of customer obsession. What is it about these big companies that let's them de-prioritize that and still thrive? Honest question.
Yemen, a Veto, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia