skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slack is a much better investment than Uber, lyft and Pinterest. Not sure why google is not compettwith them yet. It’s proven that google cannot do consumer very well but services they do very well. May be the corporation focused service like slack is what they will excel at. Couple that with their other offerings it could work very well for them. Then again point being slack doesn’t have the kind of red flags the other recent IPOs
This comment is like something out of the 1950’s.
I'm also interested in what motivates this behaviour. Anecdotally I feel that the current incentive structure is entirely financial. People may get into a field to do good, but they have to justify an ROI on everything they do. Society fetishizes financial success and universally condemns financial failure.

Live in that world as a struggling student scientist, juggling the prospects of a "marketable" thesis versus an ethical one, as debts pile up and staring down the barrel of your entire life amounting to being yet another mediocre drone / living on the streets / not being a scientist at all.

The prospect of being completely broke, unable to afford rent, unable to afford food, being an embarrassment to friends and family, these factors exist and must surely inform the judgement and behaviours of students in a position to have a study funded.

I know of phd's still struggling in their careers against the same thing, where an institute is more interested in publicity than the actual science.

The symptom may be half-assed and meaningless experiments but that is not to say the individuals responsible aren't capable or willing of so much more if the appropriate supporting social structures existed to allow ethical scientific thinkers to exist, or if institutions stopped taking in students for the money and instead tested applicants for profit.

It's easy to point out the problem but how can it be solved? To me, I think there needs to be publicly funded institutes that have no profit motive and exist purely to intake the best academic minds, this might seem anti capitalist but as a model it is an investment in the future of a society that is calculated in quality rather than quantity.
Your question exhibits a lack of understanding of 1) IPOs (they are fundraising events) and 2) software (zero marginal costs = massive leverage).

Slack, Uber and Lyft can ==EASILY== turn a profit by slowing growth.
How the heck does one spend $539.5M per year running something like Slack, that's what I'd like to know. It just doesn't seem that complicated of a service.
Being fined /= paying a fine.

I would be interested to hear exactly how much is handed over at the end of the day. How much is forgiven? How much can they deduct from their taxes somewhere else? How much is quietly renegotiated a couple years after the headlines disappear.
"Objectively effeminate" is a phrase that makes zero sense.
Fast growth skews all of those numbers, because there's a lag between marketing/sales spending and the ensuing revenue - especially for SaaS businesses where revenue is subscription-based, and typically trickles in over a period of years.

To figure out the long-term sustainability of a business, you therefore have to compare spending, revenue, revenue growth, and churn rate (or a more complicated measure which Slack is using in this filing, Net Dollar Retention Rate) in complicated formulas that I don't know off the top of my head.

(Net Dollar Retention Rate over time is one of their three "Key Business Metrics", reflecting its importance in determining steady-state viability.)
I have no idea what he is saying
Oh man, it reads just like timecube: http://timecube.2enp.com/

Per the last 'update' of Gene's:

"In 1884, meridian time personnel met

in Washington to change Earth time.

First words said was that only 1 day

could be used on Earth to not change

the 1 day marshmallow. So they applied the 1

day and ignored the other 3 days.

The marshmallow time was wrong then and it

proved wrong today. This a major lie

has so much boring feed from it's wrong.

No man on Earth has no belly-button,

it proves every believer on Earth a liar."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMZdNyRIATo
Threaded messages arguably allow for less fragmentation into other channels / DMs, and they have the checkbox for a particularly important message to be sent to both the thread and main convo.

I'm a thread fan from the start, and I've observed many who were initially skeptical start using them heavily
Looking at Uber, WeWork, JustEat etc., I get the feeling there's a growing gap between what we were brought up to believe about entrepreneurship and innovation vs. what the reality is.

We're all familiar with the '>50% of small businesses fail' stat (not the real number) and that we should be toiling and not taking a salary for years until we break even, i.e. reach a point where we're no longer losing money on every project/sale. If you aren't able to achieve this, your pricing, product-market fit, etc. have failed, because the all-knowing, all-equilibrium-izing market has spoken.

Every politician out there shows reverence for the 'small businessperson' taking risks and bringing jobs and tax revenue into their communities. But once in office, the people they meet with are Travis Kalachian and others, people who cannot make a profit, but are excellent at convincing rich investors that they should make Travis a millionaire.

The reality is that a VC-backed company can simply outprice any competitor, and if it's not enough, can lobby city hall to change the laws to favour them. And this cash spigot can stay on for years, as long as you can show you're gaining customers every quarter. If you're a big enough play, you can move your whole HQ to a low-tax friendly country and administer local operations from there.

The jobs that are created by this are right around minimum-wage level, so how is this supposed to create wealth for anybody except the shareholders who got in early with cheap valuations?
If having a poor understanding of a problem constitutes "solving it", then we could be reckless in any area, and reap the consequences.

Why would caution be not be demanded from a moral point of view? If morality places any value on the suffering of conscious beings, then the approach of "I don't know what will happen. Let's do this!" when conscious beings are the subject of an experiment is insane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Compares_2_U
Skyrim MP mod may never release as devs “don’t owe the community anything”
A better example would be traveling through a country known to execute people for their sexual orientation.

I'm only thinking ethically, it's better to use technology to protect people from prosecution for victimless "crimes" than to support murder. ;)
I'm in this world and never bring this up when people are discussing it. It's like bringing up difference between hacker/cracker. People don't care and their eyes will glaze over in disinterest.
There are so many ways to slice and dice those numbers. Drivers who already own a car they aren't going to get rid of would be paying a lot of those costs anyway (other than wear & tear and fuel). Taxes are all over the place; some pay 30%+, others nothing.

What it really comes down to is the ratio of cost of living for the driver to the amount they take home after buying gas. If I'm almost broke, want to buy more stuff than I can afford, and know I can get $100 worth of rides for $20 worth of gas in less than 2 days, the decision has already been made. As long as I have close to the same buying power, this will remain true.

It's a delicate balance, though, and when you're competing against people in more dire straits who maybe aren't as good at math, at a certain point it could become unviable.
With the exception of sheep, at which point we must ask - what other species steals another species pants?
It was the runtime required to actually run the Futures.

Rust's Futures allow for easy chaining, whereas I only implemented a simple callback that runs on completion, but it doesn't allow one to get at the computed value directly. I simply send a "check for updates" event there. Instead the value gets stored in a Mutex and has to be pulled out of that explicitly, although it can stay in the "Async" type, just that it gets stored directly in the struct after it's pulled out of the Mutex. The advantage is you don't have to pay for the locking all the time and the value can stay where it is, so you don't need to juggle it around. You can see it here: https://github.com/rabite0/hunter/blob/master/src/preview.rs...

I started working on an improved version that actually allows for a callback with a reference to the value upon completion and also a callback that moves the value out, but I haven't finished that yet and after seeing this I might not ever, but I probably will, since it's definitely educative.
How easy it is to file has little relation with how complicated they are to prepare. That article is exclusively about filing.

Intuit very little to do with making taxes complicated. There are plenty of more powerful interests responsible for that.
Any large application using React is most likely using it with Redux.
The Swiss do it. They charged a wealthy repeat offender 300k for going 85mph in a 35mph zone.
Professional, zero-cost setup for C++ projects (Part 2 of N)
Wow. Psychological trauma? Horror? Freaking out? I'm not sure what makes you think babies experience those things when "forced to sleep alone", but my two kids seemed pretty content in their cribs.

Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.
You’re saying cloud services is lower margin than retail? I don’t think that has ever been true.
I'm a former national level competitive powerlifter, I am just echoing how he is viewed from the athletes in the actual sport.
The Undermind Episode 20 – A Podcast about Brood War AI
The blog post is dated April 25, 2019, so I suspect this is a higher level overview on how it works/benchmark results/etc.
Later in the article the writer discusses how the "science" the designers say they were using probably had little to no effect on their design. The design is good, but not because of this principle. What the writer takes issue with is the attempts to justify design decisions (which may be fine on their own) with bullshit science.
Hi rekoros,

I am the CTO/Founder of YugaByte and author of the above post. Thanks for your comments, glad you liked the post! You make a great point about YugaByte DB using Apache Kudu to start out, but wanted to clarify a few things.

* This is a post about our architectural decisions in building a distributed SQL database, and less so about how we actually implement it. Hence there is no mention of any starting points as far as the codebase.

* Also, we have used the RocksDB and PostgreSQL codebases in their entirety in addition to Apache Kudu, and make no secret of this fact (https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/architecture/concepts/ackno...).
And all parents with kids in SF public schools should note that all emails from noreply@sfusd.edu (bulletins, etc.) are marked as spam.
Are you a parent? Are these hypotheticals you're running, or speaking from your own experience?
I think there is a still a possibility that Microsoft expects the phone and PC markets to merge and hopes to be there with welcoming arms when it does, but I'm getting the impression they won't build new hardware to do it if they can't convince other manufacturers to join in.
>Driverless ride sharing isn’t coming, in a meaningful way*, in the next ten years, I’m willing to bet my house on that.

You'll have to expand on 'meaningful'. I can see driverless tech being used in specific use-cases between specific locations along controlled or established routes (example, moving cargo between a seaport and the train depot).

I don't see driverless being available as a general purpose consumer vehicle that you can summon to pick up your buddy and drive back to your work.
> You say "chat app" like that means it's easy.

You're right, it takes a mind-boggling amount of wasted effort and negligence to turn a simple thing like corporate chat into something as bloated and broken as Slack.

Making something simple and easy is harder than just letting entropy destroy your product.
I've been mulling this a lot for a while now. I see so much vacant space and wonder how much of a boon it would be to small entrepreneurs and communities if the market were optimizing for filling a larger share of rental space.

I suppose it might be disappointing if the rents dropped and all it lured in were payday loan shops, and I imagine any tax enough to effect behavior will also induce some landlords to just fake occupancy to dodge the tax without the liabilities/risks of an additional business running onsite.

I'm a little skeptical (but maybe not pessimistic?) about how plausible it is to engineer public-benefit outcomes for this kind of space?
In 1983, This Bell Labs Computer Was the First Machine to Become a Chess Master
> Radix sort looks fast, with its O(n)O(n) worst-case time complexity. But, if you're using it to sort binary numbers, then there's a hidden constant factor that's usually 32 or 64 (depending on how many bits your numbers are). That's often way bigger than O(\lg(n))O(lg(n)), meaning radix sort tends to be slow in practice.

The constant factor in radix sort isn't the number of bits, it's the number of digits. Since one typically sorts on a computer using 8-bit 'digits', that's a constant factor of 4 or 8 (not 32 or 64).
I just made a socket server for a small protocol, no (explicit) Tokio.

[dependencies]
futures-preview = { version = "0.3.0-alpha.14", features = ["io-compat"] }
futures-util-preview = "0.3.0-alpha.14"
byteorder = "1.2.7"
clap = "2.32.0"
log = "0.4.3"
simple_logger = "0.5.0"
lazy_static = "1.2.0"
num-traits = "0.2"
num-derive = "0.2"
bytes = "0.4.12"

My source is on the order of ~1000 lines of (non-trivial) code and has 17 instances of 'async fn' and 23 instances of 'await!(...)'.

Nightly 2018, --release, the resulting .exe is 990 KiB.
In Ontario (Canada), that's not gonna happen now that the provincial government has shamefully decided it isn't worth spending money on.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/ontario-cancels-program-that-a...
That's just a bad designer. The foundation of UX is doing actual user research.
Alternatively, people have strong feelings both ways (fb as a product vs fb as a company) causing ambivalence.
So apart from the hang-wringing going on here. What can the original poster do?

They have literally shown what they have tried to do and it is not enough.

If this poor guy is a "false positive" then what is his path to resolution? It looks like he doesn't have one and saying "Yeah, that sucks" or "Because you made it on hacker news we will investigate" isn't helping all the other "small fry" out there.
I'm still working on https://chrisgermano.dev which primarily features my blog, rather than my portfolio. You can see my work through links in the main menu but the real focus are my posts, which don't try to sell anything or be hyper-SEO content. I just like writing about things that come to mind and I give enough links for readers to explore the topic further if they want. I didn't want to pressure myself to cater to a demographic or search engine. It's still a pretty fresh site so there isn't a lot of content yet, but you get the idea I think.
I like the solidity. I like the texture. I like how it feels cold when I haven't used it in a few hours. Psychologically, it makes it feel more like a machine and less like a toy.
Synchronous Text
You're not implying that if people just abstained from sex they wouldn't need the HPV vaccination? That's a judgement about people having pre-marital sex, is it not? And your stance that it's "less important" is based on the idea that simply abstaining from sex prevents all HPV exposure, correct? That is not a science-based conclusion. HPV can be transmitted outside of sex by walking barefoot across a bathroom floor.

But if you want a morality-driven argument it is IMHO undeniably imperative to vaccinate the general public against disease including cancer causing disease regardless of the mode of transmission of said disease and that imperative and benefits outweigh any counter argument that simply abstaining from a given behavior lowers that risk.

If I can find the citation for the article I mentioned (I did Google for it but couldn't find it the first time) I'll happily address whether in fact it's one prevented by Gardasil, etc.
An expressed argument doesn’t have a bias, the person making it has a bias. The argument can be refuted on its merits. Arguing that we should discount an argument because of its speaker’s bias is the flip side of arguing that we should give it more weight because of the speaker’s authority, another fallacy.

That being said, if the speaker (or anyone else) attempts to argue from authority, I feel it’s appropriate to use a circumstantial ad hominem argument. Not to discount the argument itself, but to point out that their own appeal to authority is not only fallacious, but also unfounded.
How many hours of work was $1000?
You're over-thinking it. GMail's market pretense is large. The number of edge cases like this in the entire world combined is a rounding error to them. It would likely be easier to fix problems to minimize bug reports and keep community good standing than increase GMail's user base by 0.001%.
Video of employees walking out of the building:
https://twitter.com/sallyshin/status/1121854424727425024
Do you mean the Congress doesn’t submit to populism? They generally follow the guidelines laid out by the constitution. Maybe you mean some are subsumed by special interests.
Online makes it even easier. I opened a >2.5% 12 mo CD online and it took an hour max. No pre-existing relationship with the bank.

The high yield savings accounts tend to have a few strings attached but nothing I’d consider a barrier to someone with at least a job that offers direct deposit.

The biggest barrier to getting a 1090-INT is not the bank or the APR. It is having a low income and not enough money to save.
I think all of you should start some kind of a movement so that this could be heared better at GMail's end.
Sounds like Navy SEALs are pussies.
Spanner uses a hierarchical table model instead, where a parent table key is a strict prefix of the child table key.

https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-and-data-model#...

From a technical perspective, I'd guess that the reason was because it makes local transactions trickier to do. Spanner has a philosophy of avoiding work that isn't required, and knows how to optimize transactions that don't require 2PC-ing data on different servers.
It is really interesting. I don't have strong opinions about FB privacy and fines. To the extent I think they're a problem, I also think they're on their way out. I do believe that the public focus (as opposed to HN focus) turned to FB because they got a healthy portion of the "blame" for Trump winning in 2016.

I find this situation to be hilarious in a cynical way. This marketing company got credit for helping elect someone to the most powerful position on the planet, and somehow that worked out REALLY poorly for the marketer. Who would've thought?
It's crazy how anything in the universe grows and decays.. even when said thing is somehow sentient and knows about this
Is this a Show HN?
The question (with Uber in particular) is that if this business model really covers up a huge ponzi scheme.

Before the last decade (or even 5 years?) the amount of money some of these companies have been raising would have been unheard of and required an IPO.

But if you can keep finding ever bigger investors to give you ever more money...

It's a really weird reality, because typically the worst kind of place to start a company is one with huge barriers to entry that requires a ton of money to get started. Yet that seems to have done quite well recently.

Squashing minimum wage service providers seems to be merely a side effect... these companies can't really make money EVEN WHEN they ignore regulations and exploit their not-technically-employees.
There's a trick you can do with squares that makes them much more accurate than normal; not sure how they would then compare to hexagons.

Instead of treating each diagonal step as "1", you treat the first diagonal step as 1, the second as 2, the third as 1, the fourth as 2, etc. Averaged out, this makes diagonal movements cost 1.5 steps each, which happens to be attractively close to 1.414.
Lost 'A Clockwork Orange' sequel discovered in author's archives
Agreed that these are the right metrics, but they're not used in the S-1 and are unfamiliar to non-SaaS-proficient investors.
Only after judge signs warrant.

That, ignoring that warrant signing might be rubber stamp in some courts cause that is a different issue, is an ok compromise between privacy and enforcing laws.
For all you budding CyberSecurity people
This is what I typically recommend to friends:

1. Resistance bands. These are a smaller, lighter, cheaper, and less intrusive investment than a weight set or a gym membership, and they continue to be a useful training supplement at all levels of training because the maximal resistance with bands comes near the end of the movement, when they're stretched, instead of at the beginning when picking up a weight. Lifters have devised combinations of weights and bands for a steady resistance gradient through the whole range of motion.

2. Focus the workouts on studying the technique. Even the simplest of movements has something to study in it. Initiation in a new technique can be done with books, videos, personal trainers, etc. but most of the work is in learning to do the movement more efficiently. Spend each workout sampling techniques and trying for good form before adding difficulty.

3. Log your progress. The real game of weight training is in the "progressive" part of "progressive overload", and logging each workout provides you with a benchmark to exceed in each session: you can aim to increase weight, reps, sets, try a more difficult form of a movement, etc. Calculations like "total volume" (weight × reps) let you adjust the composition of your training so that you don't stagnate. There are many apps that help you with logging - I started using "FitNotes" on Android years ago and never stopped.
Does it beat judy arrays?
Same thing happens to tech startups. Same thing happens to local restaurants. In fact, the restaurant failure rate is much higher than most other businesses. Restaurants go bust all the time, losing money for investors (generally smaller time investors) and employees lose jobs. It’s called life. Success is never guaranteed. Is it better for someone to have had a job for a year and lost it than that job never having been created in the first place? Businesses are formed and fail all the time. In fact, that failure process is vital: it ensures capital is being allocated towards its most efficient use. Companies not being allowed to fail is what creates stagnation as available capital is consumed by inefficient enterprises rather than being redeployed to better opportunities. It’s the very essence of a market economy.
CEO of DataCamp is leaving role indefinitely after sexual misconduct allegations
Thanks for your work, I'm a big fan of Calfile for the years when I'm eligible to use it. Out of curiosity are there any plans to support returns with capital gains?
A lot of discussion from here:

https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-en...

But there was also discussion on skeptics.com and skepticforum.com when it was news last year.

Also note that the organisation that released the videos is a known scammer who has been caught trying to monetize the UFO community many times.