skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prices for “economy” and “business class” have been trending downwards, yes. But what you now get in “business class” is what you used to get in “economy” 20-30 years ago and “business class” now is not less expensive than “economy” was 20-30 years ago.
Is there any other industry where developing an instant messaging system can result in $500 million in losses despite $700 million in revenue?
An Overview of Secure Boot in Debian
Why mirrorless cameras are taking over from DSLRs
Don't forget that products like Slack, Uber, Airbnb, etc. all could have basically everyone as their customer. These companies influence the daily lives of millions of people, with comparatively few employees, thanks to the scaling skills of technology. That's why they are valued so high and are still growing. Sure, they might be overvalued and one day the bubble can burst, but neither is it just a ponzi scheme, there is definitely a business behind it.
It's not a popular idea here because:

Capital is extremely cheap
Markets are at record highs
FOMO in tech right now is extremely strong

I can't wait to see the sentiment in two years.
Caltrain and Bart - please take note!
Exactly. They're hooked on their Ad Words income stream.
> Arguably they could be now, if they didn't invest in growth as much.

Bingo bango

https://qz.com/1196256/it-took-amazon-amzn-14-years-to-make-...

> Keep in mind that Amazon consistently lost money for its first several years as a public company. It first reported a quarterly profit in the fourth quarter of 2001 [...]
Much less clickbaity, thank you. It's a really good article.
>that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either.

You're right, it doesn't. I never said that, either.

>Seems a bit "well actually" TBH

I'm sorry if it came across that way, really. I like to be as precise as I can with everything I say, so it just came out that way naturally. Actually, one of the first replies I got here (not too long ago) was a similar kind of comment to the one we are discussing now. At first, my reaction was negative, as in "this guy is just trying to one-up me by nitpicking my comment"; then, I realized it was an opportunity to start to make myself as clear as possible whenever I wrote any other comments. Anyhow, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.
Yoga Stress
If you run a company with 1000 employees, that just $100 per seat, that's not that bad. Telephony is usually quite a lot more expensive than that.
4.2M / month on AWS is a hefty bill but it's not unheard of. Slack is, I suspect, paying for all the marked up extras such as various expensive regulation compliance addons, at-rest encryption, multi-AZ+multi-region backups and mirrors and what not. There's also probably a huge amount of stuff they use on their side to run their own tooling and analytics on their clients; costs that won't necessarily rise per user.

The part that "essentially amounts to a chat app" is probably one of the least expensive portions.

It's still high don't get me wrong, but not shockingly high considering how slack is used and trusted by so many companies.
If you know you've got a big expense in your future, its all the more reason not to spend frivolously while you can.
You poor soul. I grew up with Price Chopper in my hometown, and found the holy grail in Wegmans when I moved out for college/employment. Wegmans is leagues above them still today.
This is probably the case. I'm betting the company built a marketplace that allows stations to purchase distribution rights directly for a fixed price, as opposed to needing to call some salesperson and deal with weeks of verbal negotiation.
What do you call someone who doesn't commit crimes any more?

I submit that "criminal" is the wrong word, certainly when your focus is public order in the present day.
No, they're not already profitable. From the document on which we're commenting:

"...we incurred net losses of $146.9 million, $140.1 million, and $138.9 million in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively."
Trump’s “vision” is setting up an isolationist xenophobic plutocracy. I’m not sure if that really qualifies.
> They now do a man in the middle attack to decrypt ssl, and store all of it, if you use openvpn as a proxy without accounting for this they own you.

Is there any evidence of this?
Why hold USDT? Why not hold other coins with proven reserves, or DAI?
That whole channel is great. It dives deep on details of how roman government and politics worked. It's fascinating and surprisingly relevant to modern US politics. The tactics and strategies from the end of the Roman Republic map quite well to what we see in our[1] republic.

[1] Speaking as a US citizen to other US citizens/residents. I wouldn't be surprised if this also maps well to what other countries with a republic style legislature also see though.
mods/dang, please update the top link to one of these more-primary sources.
Agreed. But I worry about the 'first-world' convenience of this argument. Boycott abusive employers, maybe put them out of business! But the poor people working there are out of a job too. And they needed that job - it was miserable and yet they kept working, so I know they really needed it.

People have to eat every day. To lose a job, even a miserable one, is not something I want to inflict on somebody, especially sitting in my armchair in my comfortable house on 80 acres in the heartland of America.

So where does that leave my ambitions to be ethical in my buying?
Soooo.....

Where can I do research like this? It seems easy, relevant and I'm academically equipped to do it (CS master psychology bachelor background).
Why Live Video Shopping Is the Future of Ecommerce
why would anyone ever burns bond money as a penalty?
The lesson of Brexit is that all attempts at asking difficult questions like "how will this work" and "will it achieve the stated purpose" have been abandoned, and we're governed by pure short-term sloganeering.

But the restriction of free speech in the UK in the name of anti-terrorism has a long history. I'm old enough to remember when the Sinn Fein MPs were prohibited from speaking on television: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%9394_British_broadc...

It's not clear how best to campaign against this, since the legacy print media know that no matter how bad their hate content gets the law is unlikely to inconvenience them, so they're happy to campaign against free speech for their enemies.
Thanks for your feedback. I will change that
Lyft is arguably solving a much harder problem than essentially IRC
No insurance?
It's not an unreasonable position. To the annoyance of many here, for example, there are investments that are limited to high net worth individuals. It's not that big of a stretch to imagine additional regulations (whether from the SEC, the major exchanges, or a combination thereof) on which companies are allowed to go public.
They obviously got 16 very wrong. However, what is even more concerning is that Nate lately became a political hack, doing the ugly work for the democratic establishment. Just look at his twitter you can clearly see it. So I would take any "data science" he does with a grain of salt.

Edit: An example of his tweets:

"It's probably worth noting that while this group, Justice Democrats, calls Biden "out-of-touch" with the "center of energy" in the Democratic Party, only 26 of the 79 candidates it endorsed last year won their primaries, and only 7 of those went on to win the general election."

Why didn’t he add the statistic that Biden already ran 2 times in the past and won 0 times.
Where would you deport them to? Whatever your answer, I can assure you that the people over there don’t want measles people either.
How is Slack any different than any other instant messaging application? Hangouts, Jabber, Discord, Rocket Chat, and even WebEx or GoToMeeting - you can disable notifications, completely ignore, or even sign out of all of these applications.

I'm not saying that Slack are the good guys, but if your managers are forcing you to have all notifications on at all times and using @channel for every message, then it really is your management.
Letters: The Kleiner Perkins Empire Is Alive and Well
Those kind of systems have existed for awhile. Plenty of media is already licensed that way. No blockchain necessary.
My company pays quite a bit for slack and an alerts integration. My company spends ~$500k/day in client’s money and so real-time alerts in slack easily pay for themselves.
> Writing this after deliberate 5 minutes downtime.

Pomodoro is another of those life-work habit enhancements which (counterintuitively) increases productivity and happiness.
Asking whether anyone resents using https is just being snarky. You know the answer and the obviousness of it makes it condescending. We all agree that https is good, so comparing that to spf and dkim is like saying GP is stupid for not having enjoyed it.

Even ignoring spf and the other anti-spam tech that doesn't do anything remotely like https, dkim only signs messages. Https is more like pgp or s/mime, not dkim. It's like posting the hash when you share a binary online: the recipient can verify the integrity and sender (namely, whoever put up the hash), but I don't think anyone considers a signed binary to be private like bank transactions done with https.
Ah, nevermind, (a) even the "non-optimized" C version uses -O3, and (b) the "C" and the "optimized C" programs differ not only in compiler flags but they are actually different source codes. Specifically, the "optimized C" version doesn't use the faster random number generator.

If you fix that, on my machine it's 17.3 seconds for the base C version and 13.4 for the optimized one, i.e., a 22% improvement from turning on the extra optimizations (-march=native and -ffast-math).

And for whatever it's worth, because some people love hating on GCC in favor of Clang, my Clang timings are 19.5 and 16.5 seconds, respectively.
Adding my own anedocte, I tried to read some of their training material, the processes of creating an account was incredibly annoying and un-intuitive. Something that even "Web 1.0" companies back in 1997 had already figured out.

Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.

Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.
Slack does a lot of things very well, but I've seen a surprising amount of downtime. YMMV of course.
You would be amazed at the types of software large companies pay for >$100k a year to solve narrow business problems.
It is good enough that it got cloned by Mattermost. No one recreates shitty software.
I do actually resent the way google imposed HTTPS everywhere, but my issues were with the rollout as opposed to the tech. Rant for another day :)

But with the security/encryption/signing for email... yeah, if it was just an "on" switch somewhere, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, setting up SPF for something like exim isn't very straightforward at all. It's flipping LOTS of "on" switches in lots of different places, generating and copying keys around, setting permissions on all the files properly, testing etc. It turns into a legitimate project fairly quickly, and it's hard to prove that this is a better method than just really well-trained spam filters. So, basically, it ends up being by Google fiat that I had to do that project.
Until recently I worked for a company with more than 100k employees, and Slack was much preferred over the previous Microsoft-supplied chat service. I have no insider knowledge at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if that company paid that much.
Incremental Solving and Proofs (Sat Solver Written in Rust)
That's true. I did quickly skim their website, figuring if they were doing a particular efficient blockchain that it would be the kind of thing they'd want to brag about. Didn't see anything, but also didn't go digging into the whitepaper.
I wouldn't call it clickbait. It's a longform piece telling the story in a way that reflects the uncertainty that the locals feel.
Ironically, Inbox was a million times more mobile friendly than Gmail is. Turns out, tabs make for poor mobile experience.
Those are not contradictory. It is possible for corruption to thrive because of evolutionary pressure. It is even possible for it to do so despite the result not being obvious for the pressure applied and only a result of second, third, etc. order effects of the pressure.
> I write "Perhaps" because my report was a lot more specific.

How did you even get your report to be read by an engineer at Google? This seems impossible unless you have some kind of business connection.
While the title is the same as the article this has zero to do with Bitcoin.
>Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Interestingly I think they may be falling back into that now, the laptop line in particular looks confused to me.
>For short flights, I do not mind the development of "standing seats."

There are always those customers who would be willing to sit in the luggage hold or lay in the overhead bin or hang onto the wing to save $10.

But these new seating choices remind me of my train travel through Poland in the late 70's on my way to the USSR. I bought a first class ticket to Ukraine from Warsaw and when it pulled into the station there were people climbing through windows while folks used the doors to exit. By the time I got to my 1st class cabin there were about 15 people in there (seating for 6 comfortably). I had to stand in the aisle for about 8 hours overnight hanging on. Good Times...Good Times....LOL...
Why they can't just implement the measures that seem to have worked in Scotland to address knife crime seems a mystery - NIH at a political level?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45572691
I tried out a few options a couple of years back and I've stuck with Piwigo since then. It seems to work well enough for my needs and the export functionality built into digikam seems to make it simple to sync up photos between my desktop and server.
I'm curious how it is better for research, if you don't mind elaborating?
I'm not exactly sure what it is you're decrying. That we'll lose a significant quantity of Earth's hydrogen to space, leaving the atmosphere with too much oxygen? That we'll suffer a water shortage because we're using too much of it to make hydrogen? That nations will increasingly ignore other nations' aerospace sovereignty because balloons are filled with hydrogen instead of helium?

Hydrogen is still expensive to split from water, and the quantities required for deleterious effects to present are so high, that these are really distantly hypothetical "what ifs".
*jealousy, beginning of, proposed to me, confused, fell in love. Plus many more
Tell me by what means I can "vote with my dollars". Is there a travel site where I can sort flights by seat pitch?

I see options to sort by price, by airline, by number of minutes in the air, or by number of transfers, but I've never seen the option to sort by seat pitch. Half the time, it's nearly impossible to even figure out what kind of aircraft it will be.

I choose by price because it's the most relevant of the limited and mostly useless options that we're given.

Personal space is a competitive advantage. Hotels get this. The website for the nearest hotel to me has a top-level "ROOMS" page, with photographs and square footage of every room. I will pay a little more because I know what I'm getting. With air travel, I have no way of knowing which flight will pack me in like a sardine, so I might as well save the money and spend it on a hot meal at the end to recover.
The mashing of the power button works but the "power + volume up" only gives me the option to turn of the phone. It does not do anything for biometrics. iPhone 7.
On the iPhone Xr power + volume down brings you to the emergency call screen and disables faceID. Technically either volume button works, but if the phone is awake power + volume up just takes a screenshot. On my Xr with apple pay enabled mashing the power button 5 times just brings up apple pay, puts the phone to sleep and then wakes it back up.

I'm not sure if it's the same on other iPhone X models.
Trump is on it, he has them working in shifts
It's not just religious conservatives. I hardly subscribe to "horseshoe theory" but there are similarities between religious conservatives and a particular sort of anti-authority people on the left, and this is one of them. Both slices of the ideological spectrum include the rejection of authority, namely in this case either the state or liberal (as in Liberalism) scientific epistemology, or both. Post-modern hipsterism isn't quite the right term, but it's in the right vicinity IMO.

EDIT: Just remembered this: practically speaking, you can find this overlap in the snake oil ingredients sold by both Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's "wellness" company, and Alex Jones: https://qz.com/1010684/all-the-wellness-products-american-lo...
can downvoters elaborate on why they disagree?
>Can confirm, my server is also not accepted by google for years now when mailing someone with a business account.

Hey, I remember you were one of the replies[1] in my previous thread that said I was exaggerating the "send emails" issue. Maybe your difficulty with Gmail's mystery filtering algorithm will warn others that depending on personal email servers for reliable outgoing email is a non-trivial endeavor.

Perhaps personal email servers are not impossible to set up but they're also not as easy to debug as some make it out to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127
This gets to the core of Taleb's beef with FiveThirtyEight - what political forecasts are calibrated? The ones that were forecasted 6 months out, or the last forecast before the end of the election?

They may only be calibrated when enough of the facts are in to make predicting easier. Still useful, but not calibrated in the way the general public might think.
I know people who are wealthy enough to be accredited investors. However I have way more financial literacy than some of these so-called accredited investors. That I’m forbidden from buying and selling certain assets only because I’m not rich enough (yet) really goes against the whole pull yourself up by your own bootstraps ideology.
I guess the answer is that it should be required by law then? You either get vaccinated, or you go into permanent quarantine until you do. I don't understand how in this case, the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
Instead of feeding it raw sound samples, we could split the input into 16 sec, 8 sec, 4 sec and so on slices, assign each slice a "sound vector" serving as a short description of that slice and let the generator take those sound vectors as input.

I didn’t quite get it. How would you feed this variable sized input?
Some. I know some kids who grew up more anti-vax than their parents. One girl told me she had whooping cough, it was awful, but still better than the side effects of vaccinations.
Cool, 10000 more of those boxes and you can rebuild slack "in a weekend for $35k/month".

Don't mind the lawsuits when you lose your customer data and forgot to pay for backups for "cost optimization" reasons.

Don't mind the complaints when your uptime is barely one-nine.

Don't mind the customer cancellations when your 1000-user VPS doesn't actually scale to 20k concurrents.

And don't mind the HN snark when you release your slack competitor without voice/video chat support, webhooks, apps, zero debugging capabilities when things go wrong, etc, etc.

I don't even like Slack and I think their bill is too high but please don't be delusional, it's a tired HN trope.
Ditto. Ran the Docker version for years. Upgrading was as simple as changing a version number and restarting.
>A child being severely sick for extended periods can be really expensive.

If we're comparing with car accidents, I assure you: Injuries from a traffic accident will in general be much more expensive than measles treatment.
Also if you've never heard of the cat brain parasite:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii
it's audibly silent -- on post-iPhoneX models, clicking power 5 times will emit a siren tone and then autodial 911 in addition to locking out biometrics.

power + volumeup displays on the screen but does not emit a noise.

I think the police shortcut got nerfed with 12.2, but I'm not sure.
It’s Not You, It’s Men
Avengers Endgame Google Search Trick
1. Go to Google.

2. Type 'Thanos'.

3. Click on the golden glove, top right.
Thank you for turning the conversation more polite. I agree with you about options having a cost.

However, if so many of your users are complaining about something, and if the complaint is about something as important as “losing messages,” then something should be done about it. It’s no longer enough to say that “but it works for some people” or to say that “options add complexity.”

Our entire core team has discussed this. Nobody wants threads. They all lose messages due to this. But sometimes we accidentally respond to messages that start a thread. So, we want this option to be removed for the entire organization. But we can’t.

It’s an option that’ll have cost, yes. But, it’ll be much simpler than many other complicated (and low value) things Slack has worked on in past two years. Those other things are also adding complexity, slowing down dev, increasing things to test, etc. And, again, this option solves a serious and fundamental problem of losing messages. So, it’s worth the cost for many of their users.
Really the whole "techlash" feels incredibly manufactured in the first place - I think the uniform shallowness of criticisms is part of its smell. I mean most content it shallow but you expect a "bell curve" of nuance between slogan repeaters and those pondering more in depth at the edges. Look at other movements and their diversity of ideas - even if mostly in agreement differing implementations tend to be proposed by some even if most parrot shallow slogans.

The selectivity also stinks. Comcast, a serial worst company winner infamous for poor service is left unmentioned while social media somehow qualifies as "a monopoly" and the equivalent of Store Brands in Amazon is somehow monopoly abuse?
They're doing quite a bit of TV advertising[1]. Production and flighting costs on commercials, at a global scale, isn't going to come cheaply.

[1] https://www.ispot.tv/brands/Zyh/slack/
Trump uses the same logic to deny climate change.
Considering the exponential growth of mandatory lockout timers between repeated failed attempts, i'm not super worried.
I can say the same about people making sweeping generalizations. Maybe you're not as intelligent as you think you are, and you're in fact missing something due to your clouded judgement.
I was referring to his idea of bringing back manufacturing and jobs in general, his space policy and other such initiatives in the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s.
Nevermind, raw markdown is good enough for this forum.
Nice find!

Given my nick, I think i should rebind that to "do you have any relatives in afghanistan?"
I traded a bit of performance for aesthetics by cloning the children of a node. I tried the todomvc benchmark and saw it wasn't so bad without employing optimizations in placed. It's still in it's early stage though.
I don't see how this is relevant? I don't have a strong need to believe there is more in the universe than matter. In fact, as mentioned earlier I believed for a long time everything could be explained in that way.

But after further reflection I have arrived at a different conclusion.

Throwing out allegations of wishful thinking in a debate should at least be substantiated. Otherwise I can equally validly say it's wishful thinking on your part to believe consciousness can be explained in material terms.
I actually find that a couple of hours of coding on personal projects from 9 to 11 (but not later) actually has a calming effect on me that increases sleep quality.

Mind you - I don't have hard data to support this!