skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest issue is that low margin, capital intensive businesses don’t scale well in terms of valuation.

It’s totally doable for a Chinese restaurant or pizza place to have a guy with a car delivering food. It is more difficult for McDonald’s to have 100,000 delivery drivers across its various channels and make money — which is why they didn’t do it.

Most of the value of scaling these services is branding. That’s why franchises for the Merry Maids, Firestone Auto Service, or Roto Rooter exist. The rest of these businesses are just obviously dumb ideas burning cash for the off chance that it will work out somehow.

Uber/Lyft are the big high risk ones that will either succeed or implode. As both companies race to the bottom, it’s a matter of time before people get killed by incompetent/unlicensed drivers or dangerous vehicles. Then the advantage of a national brand turns to poison.
There are seven engines, and the firmware can adjust to the loss of one.
"The company also says it’s intuitive and safe to use, with the computer-controlled systems providing built-in redundancies and automatic compensation if one of the jet engines fails. “I thought it was a gust of wind,” Henry Berkowitz, one of the two former special operators who now work for Zapata, told CNBC in 2017."

See https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23854/one-company-thin...
Ask HN: Where to Find Computer Science Research Papers?
My brief search into this only led to the ACM digital library, which seems pretty good. Are there any other services, free or paid, that provide access to old and new computer science research?
I'd actually implement it as a transparent venv and use pinned versions in a requirements.txt – with hashes, of course.
How do you feel about Wingdings?
1/4 is homophobic.
I am unimpressed by most armchair reasoning (including my own) and would rather read people's stories about what happened to them. Recommended reading is useful too. Logic hardly matters, give me the data it's based on.

A problem with anonymous forums is you don't know whether to trust the stories. At best we end up with something like Wikipedia where all facts are copied from other sources.
Elsevier/Mendeley also encrypt your own data on disk so you can't get it back out:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/23/mendeleys-encrypted-repos...
If you need to have lots of query parameters (I'm assuming that's what you're referring to) then something is wrong in your design. Start by dividing your problem into simpler parts and go from there.

A dumb idea would be to encapsulate various options into a single query parameter. Compressing query parameter's names and values and encoding them in base64 (or some other base of your choice) might also help. But all of this will just add tons of needless complexity to it.

Do you really NEED 20+ query parameters?

I am curious, though. What are you actually trying to achieve here?
"Why a mock doesn't work" *in python because of reasons

fixed the title.
I see! This is indeed very different from the US, more like an award I guess.
I don’t want to pay for all the meals I eat, a large number of them are terrible... So I don’t go back. But you have to pay for what you eat.
Was this a European or American lawyer?

I'm interested because my understanding has been most Europeans understood it the same way I did.
If Mac, you can install them through Homebrew (Cask). Otherwise, the files are online at the Google Fonts GitHub.
Maybe the internet was a bad idea. Maybe the whole neolithic revolution was a bad idea.
Internet.

Old tech.

The internet allows it to be fine tuned, progressed and be globalised.

Plus to a lessor extent computing power. It super speeds the internet. ie. modelling is quicker, which allows quicker iterations.
Isn’t every single day at work just like an escape room?

So why on $DEITY’s blue earth would you ever voluntarily subject yourself to that same kind of experience?
> If a company's operations aren't profitable, it wouldn't have "otherwise survived". If it is profitable, then bankruptcy will wipe out debt and permit it to continue operations, hence it will continue to survive. It's the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.

Debt is wiped out after liquidation. Most companies do not survive this. Debt service can make the difference between profitability or unprofitability. Remember, this is debt that was forced on the company externally.

> Why are banks uniquely bad at risk analysis of LBO debt as opposed to, say, regular corporate debt, or junk bonds, etc?

I never said they are bad at risk analysis, I am saying they do not truly carry the risk in the first place. The difference is in the outcome. An LBO that should never have happened is worse than a corporate loan that should not exist.
The word "pledge" has been ruined for me for good. Emotions of unpleasant kind are evoked when I hear it.
Jeez. Even coding bootcamps teach developers to use at least bcrypt for passwords.
With Google Fiber having mostly failed to induce typical broadband in the US above 200 Mbps, what is the conventional wisdom on when the next significant shift in speeds will come, and what the enabling tech will be?

Is it just going to be a glacial rollout of fiber along the last mile to homes? If so, what are the estimates for, say, the date when the median US home has a gigabit connection?
Proofs are actually incredibly hard to review. Problems will be found in what had been accepted to be a "good" proof years to decades later. There's a whole movement to move proofs over to something/anything more verifiable (e.g. representing all proofs in Coq--but even then you're relying on the Coq proof assistant to have zero bugs).

Furthermore, the standard for mathematical proof has also changed over time, most significantly in the early 20th century. This led to a number of existing results needing to be re-proved (or thrown out! Some were incorrect!).

Exactly what qualifies as a proof is a FASCINATING debate. Mathematics is created by consensus, just like all other knowledge.
As I understand it, target blood glucose levels for diabetics are based on normal blood glucose levels in healthy (non-diabetic) individuals. So presumably a healthy body has some internal mechanism for determining when and how much insulin to produce/release into the blood stream.

As far as I know, we haven't figured out what that mechanism is. But I'm not diabetic and I'm much less prone to being hypoglycemic than I once was, so my reading on the subject is fairly casual compared to when I did things like wrote a research paper on Functional Hypoglycemia in part for my own edification.
About Giving Away API Knowledge for Free
Just because it's cliché doesn't mean it isn't specific and thus still useful. I don't like the term either, but that doesn't stop it being the best term to explain a rather particular but difficult-to-illustrate concept with the highest level of unambiguity.

Also, why liberal arts in scare quotes? Of course the term comes from liberal arts; social sciences come under that umbrella and have done for years. If it's a politically-charged term, then just call it humanities.
Many linters will automatically remove unnecessary parens. I sometimes wish there was an option for the opposite: automatically insert parens, perhaps only for certain classes of expressions (always insert parens for ternaries, for instance)
Yes was referring to 'central business district'.

And good to find out it's an Australia centric expression. Thanks.
Yes, dosages vary by your size, weight, gender, stress, and other factors. Part of type 2 diabetes is often insulin resistance, but people with type 1 can also suffer from it as well (although it's not the cause of type 1). Some people even need to use highly concentrated forms of insulin, ie U-500 instead of the standard U-100.
> When was the last time you gave someone a cassette?

When was the last time you gave someone non-technical a song that's only on a streaming service?

Yeah, you can send a link, and it can disappear any time, forever. Might be blocked in their country, and so on. Meanwile, I still have cassettes of me and friends just derping around, ages ago. If I give you music that way, at least you actually have it. It decays, sure, but no worse than it does for people who don't know what a file is, who are at the whim of platforms.
>Debt is wiped out after liquidation.

Nope. I get the feeling you don't know the difference between chapter 7 and chapter 11?

>An LBO that should never have happened is worse than a corporate loan that should not exist.

Why?
That is not quite what I meant. What I meant is independent of opt-in or opt-out, but is rather saying that such features in the browser should be and must be configurable, and that is separate from the issue of consent. (Maybe they should be disable third party cookies by default, or whatever, but it will work either way.)

What they will do with the data you give to them, is a separate issue than the web browser. The company you are dealing with still needs to have a proper policy for that, but that is different than the issue of the client configuration.

Requiring a warning message about cookies on the web page is not helpful, because that is the wrong place to put it; the browser can provide its own such warning, and the user can configure it. (Lynx provides the possibility to ask when a cookie is received.)

So, the actual problem is the browser providers designing them stupid, and making them such complicated that it is difficult to make up a new one which is actually good.
for industrial applications, basically any other serial solution other than usb is a far better choice than usb. "almost" doesn't work for industrial applications. i personally don't think it works for consumer applications either, but we've all been programmed to deal with issues arising from poorly specified and implemented standards.

i am not for sure why i am downvoted so much, but i suppose it's because most here don't interact with hardware at all. usb, and the associated ecosystem, is a nightmare for anyone who has dealt with it on the job outside of charging their phone.
The NYT is doing rather well with their paid online offering. Around 3m online subscribers.

FT is also dong well at 1m total subscribers (includes print, I believe).

I wouldn’t call either one a niche offering. Personally I paid for one paper or the other since being 16.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/315041/new-york-times-co...

2: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nikkei-ft-readers/financi...
What on earth is a ‘family of companies’? Googling for it just gets me some sort of crane conglomerate.
> What kind of license is it?

It's licensed under the Apache License:

https://github.com/itsonecube/jtk/blob/dev/LICENSE

The Apache License is a permissive license, similar to MIT or BSD.
Why not apply that to teachers and doctors etc?
Most insulin pumps are worn 24/7 or very close to it (some people will disconnect briefly when showering, plus switching out tubing/etc). Insulin pumps often use a faster acting type of insulin, so that within 3-4 hours, it's all gone, and from there, you quickly enter diabetic ketoacidosis. You can take it off for short periods of time if you make sure to dose for it or take shots periodically while you're disconnected.
> Debt is wiped out after liquidation.

Also true, but a key feature of bankruptcy is discharge of debt. Liquidation is not required for elimination of debt.
>it’s a matter of time before people get killed by incompetent/unlicensed drivers or dangerous vehicles.

Unlikely. We're talking about driving cars over short distances, something the vast majority of people can do (and do anyway) well enough, not brain surgery.
Maybe if the different news medias organized to create a shared payment account, then individual articles could be easily deducted from that one bucket.
This is a great ruling, big win for privacy advocates and Europeans!
Sure, you can criticize the opinions of people. But you did not. You said that the fact that they had set forth their opinion, the fact that they had engaged in a speech act, was itself unpleasant.

Now that's your right, of course, but it strikes me as hypocritical. Argue why their position is wrong and take delight in the fact that they set out an argument that you can respond to. Or, perhaps, argue that their position is too dangerous to be stated and poses a long-term threat to the freedom of speech—but distinguish that argument from their own, which is much the same.
My in-laws gave us an audiobook CD maybe 6-8mo after I bought my 2016 VW, and I honestly had to think about whether it had a CD player or not. I had a vague recollection that there was something in the glovebox, was hoping it was a CD player for the audio system and not for nav -- and I was right!

Our Tesla 3 definitely does not have a CD/tape player, although you can plug in USB sticks with music.
The Booming Business of Food Delivery
> downsizing without layoffs

It's the most destructive form of downsizing for the company, as the competent staff who have options jump ship and only the dregs are left hanging around.
Read the man page! ;)

https://openaps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/Gear%20Up/pump...
Most companies who file for bankruptcy continue existing afterwards, just without the debt.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out ...
Agreed, that is a better article, but even so - every time I read about this space I get more confused. I get that very smart people are throwing large sums of money at it, so there's obviously some logic that I'm not getting.
For example, the Medium piece says that Uber has a lucrative monopoly, but then goes on to say that it loses 700M per quarter. How is that lucrative?
And self-driving cars are held up as the solution to thin margins but to me it seems that the only saving grace for these companies is that they get drivers to bring their own cars, do their own maintenance, pay their own insurance, etc. Considering how expensive driverless cars will inevitably be when they first appear and the sheer number that these companies will require to actually replace their contractors/partners/whatever they call their drivers, 2030 seems a very optimistic target for profitability.
But then I'm just some schmuck - surely the VCs have all had those thoughts and are ploughing on regardless because they know something else?
There are two topics that are HUGELY overrepresented in discussions of computer security: password complexity and password hashing.

MD5 hashes is not good. But it also isn't catastrophe level security. If you aren't reusing passwords then the hashing choice doesn't matter since the system has already been breached. If you are reusing passwords you don't exactly want to rely on bcrypt hardness to keep you safe.

If I could make the web services I use switch to MD5 hashes and spend more time on other relevant security posture, I'd very seriously consider that.
I agree that USB is terrible. RS-232 is good for some things, and MIDI is good for some things.
Andrew Bolt's mocking of Greta Thunberg leaves autism advocates 'disgusted'
> would rather read people's stories about what happened to them. Recommended reading is useful too. Logic hardly matters, give me the data it's based on.

At which point, you're drawing a conclusion. I like to hear people's stories and firsthand experiences, too. They help us get into the shoes of someone else and get a new perspective. However, I take them for what they are: anecdotes. If we want to draw some conclusion or insight from the data, then we must apply reasoning.
I live out in the middle of nowhere. 10 miles away from a post office, 15 miles from the nearest town with a high school, and 20 miles in a different direction from a city with any major retail outlets. And right now they're laying fiber in our area and should be available sometime next year. This really surprised me and I wasn't expecting it for another decade at least.

I'm actually not too hopeful about Starlink and LEO satellite internet for rural areas without some kind of government subsidies(which already exist for rural areas... at least phone ones IIRC). I'm a little more hopeful that that it may spook rural DSL monopolies into building out fiber.
Venom Injection: How Ant Stingers Work [video]
Would be interesting to see how he treats Voigt lineshape
Why is this a redirect link? The article is at the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/technology/8chan-shooting...
Na, I go in and buy a cooked fish then split it among thousands like a digital Jesus.
More detail and more examination of the difficulties but their concluding paragraph is still optimistic:

> In the emerging food delivery wars, the stakes are high, the margins are slim, and the competition is vast. Some will fail. Others will quit. But a few of them might just end up delivering the billion-dollar goods.

I doubt it. I think food delivery is something that can only work where the food makers are in control, not the food deliverers.
Audio cassette can sometimes be good if you want to make recordings.
> Look at a statement of equivalence. You might say that "A is equal to B" or "A == B". There are two "flows" going on there: A has to match up with B, sure, but B also has to match up with A.

Weird way to describe the symmetric property of equality from discrete math 201
You might be living in the book Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.
I think people copy paste links all of the time. Modern link preview cards fed by og tags are a big thing, and interpreted nearly everywhere.
I had the same disappointed reaction. I wanted to read something general about mocking. But then I remembered that Ned writes a lot about Python, so I could've guessed it would be about Python. Most of his readers would know too.

Not everything is written to score points on HN. If the title is confusing here, that's our problem, not the authors'.
https://www.quickenloans.com/about/partner-company
I don't know how they do it, but I've seen some really diehard anti Oracle companies adopt Oracle. One place had a really large mainframe installation and DB2 licensed all over. They moved to Oracle. I was shocked. They play some kind of massive long game, no one else is at their level when it comes to sales.
>It's not about what's European or American.

In fact, it is. We have very different ideas about how to achieve outcomes (i.e. Old World vs. New World) we commonly share as goals. I absolutely disagree that "the solution is government." Europe hasn't achieved GDP growth over 1% for 20 years, and one has to wonder if it's because they over tax their middle class.

I do not discount your sovereignty, only your right to assert it over our sovereignty. One size does not fit all, and many Americans are being fooled by the subsidies others receive.

I appreciate your civility, and contributions to HN over the years, but also recognize the unAmerican nature of your ideas. What concerns me is that your ideas are infecting our young people.

I recommend Democracy in America written by Tocqueville in ~1840. It's available for free on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America
My impression is that almost all class actions are filed by individuals on behalf of classes consisting primarily of individuals rather than companies. I'd be curious to see if you have a counterexample of companies abusing the class action process as plaintiffs.
> That said, I also don't like Spring/Guice/Dagger auto-wiring DI (somewhat guessing that is what caused your headaches), and instead just create an "AppContext" type with all of the applications "singletons" and pass that around.

> Granted, it's still global-ish, so maybe I'm cheating, but its nicer IMO than module hacks.

I agree with you. I would like better support for (a) intersection types and (b) excluding global names.

With intersection types, you avoid the globalish nature, since you can say "this method takes a PersistentUserStore", "this method takes a LoggerInterface", and "the parent method takes a PersistentUserStore&LoggerInterface" which can be passed to both. Lo and behold, the fact that it's globalish disappears since at any given point, you only

Unfortunately, as with all things, PhpStorm does this exactly wrong - so that an intersection type is inspected as tho it were a union type and it gives me no particular benefit. Jetbrains seems less interested in helping me avoid bugs and focuses on helping me avoid reading the php.net manual. I appreciate it when I don't need to check out the manual, but I need to avoid bugs.

As for excluding global names - if there were some way to make it illegal to say `new Foo`, except in the top of the code, for certain values of "Foo", it would be a serious help in keeping my tests of business logic free of implementation details. I'm not entirely sure how to restrict those "certain values of Foo" though.
Zero to startup in 10 weeks: 2 weeks in
"It makes us more profitable, tough" is patently not a legitimate interest, and would fail the balancing test (the individual's interest overrides the legitimate interest). If it were as simple as "it helps fund our operation", the whole of the GDPR would be instantly rendered toothless as why else would they gather unnecessary data? It would open a "loophole" that lets everything through.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Don't know of Germany's position but the UK's ICO added significant staff and budget when the switch from Data Protection to GDPR came in.
Satellites Reveal Which Lightning Strikes Are Most Likely to Start Wildfires
What happens to politicians who don't listen to lobbyists? Do they win reelection?
I learned first about Regular Expressions i.e. the finite automata that do a simpler subset of what Regex can do. Learning about this and drawing out the graphs etc, may help commit to memory.

Also start using them to help you find and replace stuff in a text editor. They are very handy for converting for example a csv into code.
How much did the Planetary Society’s light sail sail?
Dying Gasp of One Local Newspaper
Where are the jobs in reverse engineering? I've seen SW engineering positions at certain three letter agencies mention reverse engineering, but I imagine many people would have ethical stances against working for those type of employers.

On another note, I'm on a few projects doing reverse engineering and find myself left with more questions than answers. Are there any large online communities with people who could help me out when I have questions. Something like the osdev wiki particularly for reverse engineering.
You should maybe post it as a proper HN story, if you think it's worth us reading it and discussing.
The last man to have built Mount Rushmore
How is this realistic? How do you know he wasn't using Tor?
Lol, this is how 90% of startups with technical risk are funded
Amazing; this is just about how I approach it, except I have a bit more slack for the "CIP": 90 days is not a long time at many organizations larger than a certain size (say, about 100 people). I'm generally content as long as progress is being made to improve at a reasonable pace, and few or no regressions occur.
Xdsrgxdrsfgrfsx
https://www.reddit.com/cm414u/

https://www.reddit.com/cm4159/

https://www.reddit.com/cm415o/

https://www.reddit.com/cm415y/

https://www.reddit.com/cm4164/
“Struggle in general with an occasional winner takes all” sounds bad.

But think about a market like... search engines. They struggle in general; almost all of them from the 90s died. There was just the occasional winner, Google, that took it all.

If you think about it that way, a market that can support even a single “winner taking all” is pretty promising and exciting.
Hi HN - OP here - this is an experiment I'm doing where I'm trying to go from nothing but an idea to a product with paying customers in 10 weeks, following along the YC Startup School program, and blogging the whole process.

I'm 2 weeks in and have written daily updates each day. Hope this might be entertaining & useful for fellow hackers and bootstrappers in the community!
Inability to tell the truth is a failure of company culture!!