skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rust is pretty neat and I would like to use it more. It seems like it could be the ideal tool for performance-optimized software, like C++ was 15 years ago. Unfortunately, there isn't all that much performance-optimized software that I am writing nowadays.
Thanks for the comment. Will add the warnings for sure. I just built this in under an hour to test Workers KV. :)
I love this idea of words which have negative(or positive) connotations in someones belief systems triggering theme based sentence generation via markov chains. I feel like this is a bizarrely insightful take on how people actually think and respond to things.
imagine Elons greatest gift to mankind was a internet that could not be abused or spied on, and you only needed a satellite dish to access it. even if it was too slow to play games on.
1) Write a lot. At first, write without any intention of showing it to others, and without any judgement about how good or bad it is. Just write.

In On Writing Stephen King talks about a mindset of "Write once with the door closed, and then again with the door open". I interpret this to mean what you say. Write for yourself first, then revise / edit / rewrite with the intention to share with others.

4) Recognize that most of what results in a piece of good writing is good editing.

Two of my favorite writers, Stephen King and Dean Koontz, have both made very similar points at times. Koontz famously said he writes his books one page at a time. That is, he writes about a page worth of material, then revises / edits until he believes that page is good, and only then does he move on. King also emphasizes that you don't start out writing prose that reads like the (published) prose of your favorite authors.

So yeah... just write, and then revise ruthlessly.
Mozilla's priorities are (and have mostly always been) for FF on Windows. It's a gripe that me (and the great majority of FF devs who use Macs and Linux boxes) have been suffering under for years) that those OSs will just never be the highest priority--and the reasons why have much to do with Apple and their Apple-first mentality for their platform. It is only partly a joke that the last users of Firefox will be software developers and their grandmothers. But there are a lot more grannies than devs.
> So, why are you troubled that you can't debate this particular thing, when I'm sure there are things you shouldn't debate about your colleagues?

I'm troubled by the top-down nature of what is decided to be beyond debate vs not: it feels like it is leading to a scary kind of authoritarianism I don't want.

For fun, I'll throw you a specific plausible hypothetical. If an app has a gender identity field, and a user enters "Apache Helicopter", should this be treated as valid data or not?
Given the cesspool of trolls, advertisements, fake media, bullshit social media (all of it), mass surveillance, the harvesting and sale of your personal information at every turn, and what is essentially unchecked psychological warfare taking place all across the net, I'm not sure just dumping people on it is the best thing
Popular methods of representing pollution levels sometimes display data in “equivalent number of cigarettes smoked”, but what about actual cigarette smoke?

There’s an interesting difference between actual pollution levels and what is perceptible. You can’t as easily detect the odour of nitrogen dioxide or micro particles from brakes.

I imagine cigarette smoke accounts for very little pollution measured by typical methods, but walking down a busy street in London you’re likely to pass through dense clouds of it every few meters. I wonder how much difference this concentrated method of delivery makes to the effective toxicity.
This is a really good comment on why some jeans and pants can be so expensive.

Another thing I'd like to emphasize is ethical labor practices and material sourcing. Paying workers in places like the USA or Japan is really expensive compared to getting jeans made in China or etc. That includes getting the denim as well, if you want selvedge denim I don't believe there are any selvedge mills left anywhere in the world outside of Japan or Italy.

Then add on what you mention about older machinery and slower production runs. Additional handmade details add more labor time. And quality control is generally much higher, you can line up 5 pairs of the exact same model/size and they'll line up perfectly. With the lower end of Levi's models (not Made&Crafted), you can get 5 "identical" jeans and they'll have a variation of about an inch in both length and waist. Not a huge deal to some, but it's another thing that adds more time to the production.

Even Levi's own Made in USA and Made in Japan lines are in the same price range, $150-$300 dollars.

https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/search/made%20in%20japan

https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/search/made%20in%20usa
Honestly your best bet is to talk to people. I doubt cold calling/knocking on the door of a business will succeed, but people get enthusiastic when it comes to complaining about tedious/monotonous work. Especially at bars. Turn to someone nearby and say "I am looking for ideas to yadda yadda save people time and frustration. Is there any tedious process you deal with at work which you think doesn't need a person to deal with?" If you travel, this is especially common in airports. I've never asked someone this question and yet people rant at me all the time once I say "software developer".
Thats this guy everyone is talking about. He lost $70B in 2000.
Some people believe most of the VC industry is just a ponzi scheme, where you try to find a greater fool until eventually the final fool is the public. Of course by then all of the VC investors have made enormous returns on a company that was clearly never that great to begin with.

I'm not saying I agree with this, but it's an interesting theory. It seems pretty obvious that this sometimes happens, as evidenced by Softbank and WeWork, the question is how pervasive is this mentality?

I guess I should probably attempt to answer my own question and analyze how many VC firms hold onto stock after the company goes public, although that will only provide data for late stage investors.
Right. It's been around for 30+ years and it's meant to solve this exact problem.

However, the cost of training staff and implementation is often out of reach for SMBs, still.
> But, again, many of them joined hoping to get some upside when the company went public -- which was a gamble that didn't pan out.

I'm sure many joined just because they wanted a job. We can't blame some random executive assistant for not knowing the ins and outs of the company's financial situation or the risk that they were taking. Their layoff will hurt.
This is what I am most excited about. I have been using the improvements through nightly since they were released, I think little more than a month, and I couldn't be happier. I'd hate to have to use Chrome and I welcome the competition to webkit.
Okay, how about the copper that transports that electron to somewhere it can do useful work? How about the 1800C furnace that melts sand into the silicon for the solar panel? How about the diesel fuel that the massive mining trucks used to haul the copper ore out of the mine are fueled with (these things are heavy and get something like 8 gallons to the mile (not a typo) good luck running them on batteries)?

Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.
This is pretty interesting. I am interested in learning more about serverless so I will be excited when the source code becomes available
It depends on your ebay skill. You can look up the parts in the T440p upgrade guide: https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/11/07/thinkpad-t440p-buyers-g...
They did until 2017, so they could always change their minds again.
You do shadow rate-limit good-faith users, though. Quite frequently, I believe, as far as it's possible to tell.
https://ncase.me/ballot/ highlights those _strange artifacts_ in the interactive simulations.
More important than any culture fit is for a business to make a profit. Without that, there's no business to begin with, and while I concede that different traits can make that easier or harder, a good manager can make a team where none would have emerged without them. It's repeated often that employees don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers.

A good manager will inspire motivation, bring comfort, foster a nonthreatening environment with an appropriate level of conflict, and shape a competitive force to be reckoned with. This does not mean creating a hug box. Not having a hug box doesn't mean employees have to be unhappy. It's bad managers whose ineffectiveness allows negative traits (which everybody has) to impact other employees.
when you think about it, not toooo surprising. Haskell's undeniable killer app is parsing and compilation, so pandoc was pretty much a project destined for Haskell if I ever saw one :)
I remember the pizza ordering scene in The Net (1995) seemed very futuristic at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUSqX7B5DXs
Nice, but I’m disappointed a website behind CloudFlare [1] allows XSS [2]

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/waf/

[2] https://telex.blog/p/0yg14u6j
Firefox has pretty good performance tools now: https://profiler.firefox.com/
Do You Know What Time It Is?
> Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into monetization mode?

No, that happened when they started selling ads.
You keep raising pay until people are willing, uncoerced, to take jobs that they don't find "fulfilling". You do that just by offering money for the job. You don't try to guess who "should" take the job, you just offer it. You don't compel labor, you don't print money. You just raise the pay, and raise the rates you charge for garbage collection to pay the salaries. (And, yeah, at that point you have a bit of coercion, because people have to have garbage service. If a home doesn't, they're probably going to be in violation of some kind of law.)
OK, we've changed to that from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/business/dealbook/wework-.... Thanks.
Firefox users should take a look at the "Auto Tab Discard"[0] extension. It offloads inactive tabs, saving CPU and RAM, (similar to how Safari works).

It doesn't work quite as transparently (or effectively) as Safari's equivalent functionality, but it does make a noticeable difference.
It's worked very well for me.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
But why are they a problem?

Look, there's two kinds of taxes. One is to raise revenue, one is to punish behavior we don't like. Once you start describing the rich as a problem, it makes me think that this is the second kind of tax, and I really don't think that accumulating wealth, and helping out everyone else along the way by growing the economy, is something we should be punishing.

If you say "the uber-rich ($10m is 99th percentile) do bad things, therefore we should tax the uber-rich", I'll really have to disagree - tax the bad things they do, not the demographic group!
“Black people don't have a monopoly on messing up. Anyone can be excellent”
I've never thought about it that way before, but you're absolutely right.

Another "domain-specific mail merge" that I built was a tool to pull summary data out of the client financial records and populate specific fields in some off-the-shelf income tax software.

That was a terrible tool to write and maintain. The tax software's import feature didn't actually work correctly. I reached out to the vendor and the response was basically "Works for us", so doing it the right way wasn't an option.

Instead, I used VBA to blindly enter data into the program using SendKeys[0]. Maintaining the program was a case of tabbing through and counting the number of times I had to tab. Enter first name, tab, enter last name, tab three times, enter address line 1, etc. Next year when the forms in the tax software changed I'd have to add/remove tabs in the appropriate places, sometimes input stuff in a different order, etc.

As a program, it was horrible, horrible code. As a useful tool for the business, it was incredible. It saved a ton of time and the staff that used to do this by hand, in addition to doing actual work on the more complex files, were incredibly happy.

Overall, it was completely worth it.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/language/referen...
>Those reserves both inflate asset prices and enable the banks to make loans on which interest is paid

Banks don't need those assets to make loans. Banks can make loans whenever and where ever they want, and can simply borrow from the Fed. This is the point of short-term interest rates - banks can lend past reserve requirements whenever they find a decent loan to make. It's the difference between exogenous and endogenous theories of money, and modern economies with central banks usually work this way to allow the market to decide how much money is needed, not how much reserves a bank can obtain because a central bank absorbed assets.

And most loans rate people get are tied pretty directly to Fed rates, not bank reserves. This is again due to endogenous money creation - demand creates money, not reserves. So the Fed and banks having 0 reserves or having 100 trillion reserves is nearly irrelevant - it is interest rates that matter, and those are set directly by the Fed board.

Also, if you recall, the banks were famously not giving loans after the bailouts, despite having the capital to do so [4]. I guess that also doesn't help your claims.

>they pay interest on a loan enabled by that 2T+ expansion

If you're going that far afield, then it's simple to point out what financial trouble they would be in if the Fed didn't make those loans. People would likely be far worse, in which case it makes the argument for those loans even stronger.

It would be interesting to check even correlation between Fed balance and interest rates.

Here's [1] an IGM Forum economist poll of most of the country's top economists on whether or not the bailouts improved unemployment. I'd guess being unemployed is worse than claimed interest rate hikes.

Here's [2] their answer to the question: "the benefits of bailing out U.S. banks in 2008 will end up exceeding the costs" - resulting in strong support with certainty (especially considering the types of questions these polls ask - check other questions).

So there's not much real argument on the bailouts being beneficial.

Now that the Fed is selling off MBS [3], shouldn't that cause the reverse of what you claim absorbing them did? Because those effects are not see in the markets. Maybe your effects did not happen?

[1] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/bank-bailouts

[2] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/bailouts-banks-and-automak...

[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

[4] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
Really exciting. This was the one thing keeping me from using Firefox on my personal laptop.
How can I, as a mere user, support Mozilla (except spreading the word)? Is it still true that their main source of income is a search agreement with Google?
He created an 8 billion dollar company from 12 billion dollars. A feat many are capable of.
throwaway I was hired as the first software developer for an eCommerce company in the late 90's. Little could I know at the time that writing secure server software would become so lucrative. While I was not directly impacted by the bust given my founding role and creative importance in value to the organization never-the-less the bust did hit the business. Having been the sole architect and first to create many of the founding technologies in payments used everywhere today our company was being utilized by Paypal for several years before they created this functionality themselves in house. The bust was a cycle of economics unavoidable but looking at database records in realtime for Ebay and therefore PayPal purchases of famous people was a way to pass the time. And yes, I still create critical realtime systems.
> a third-party candidate doesn't spoil an election

Without the fear of throwing their vote away, more will rank the 3rd party candidate first.
Looking for a collaborator for my side project https://findkismet.com

Coincidentally, the app itself could be used to find a cofounder. It's how I met mine.
One of my favorite useless facts is that the Prime Meridian of Mars was defined and that definition was universally accepted decades before there was agreement on where to put Earth's Prime Meridian. Goes to show how much easier it is to get things done when you don't have to worry about international pissing contests and people's preexisting biases.
Fast and Slow in 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract
https://www.smart-ag.com/ - Autonomous tractors
Well done!

I hear a lot of complaints about serverless for performance and cost but I think this is exactly what Serverless is meant to do - Reduce upfront cost for low traffic and remove the barrier of managing infrastructure.

Many app welcome the benefits despite the tradeoffs.
I think you mean "alluding". Eluding means avoiding.
I'm ready to dump far too much of my disposable income on chasing the feelings this game gave me when I was a kid. This is the game that turned me into a gamer.
Couldn't then a completely unknown person win?
So odd to see numerical URLs. There was an article here on HN about that a month or so ago.
Is the posterior you hold on your hypothesis different from your prior after being presented with https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2007.06.011 ?
Newmann will likely end up making billions for investors, so it makes sense.

The $47 IPO crash is not a matter of accounting fraud, rather, a failure to project when the hype train would end.

The thing is there's incredibly leverage in some of these plays - they require funding for each successive step - if they don't get it, then even a spectacular business can 'crash'.

Like a rocket to the moon, each stage needs more fuel until it's 'in orbit' and without that even a 'great mission' can crash.

You could argue they could have conserved their dollars etc. but then they would just be some small, local business.

So the 'game' being played is/was all around what future of the business will materially look like. Because there's so much grey area in it, it's ripe for shenanigans but on the other hand, most fast flyers will look something like that.

My bet is that the rocket fuel for WW stops at stage 4 instead of stage 5 and they never really had a plan for 'orbit' (i.e. normalized profitability) so it's going to be a painful down-ratchet, but it will be turned into a normal company.

Paradoxically - we can't write off out important the hype was for inspiring people into their work. That inspiration was maybe poorly derived, but it was not fake. Rebecca Newman was apparently head designer and most of the aesthetic was probably her vision. Those things are not easily reproduced in a board room: without leadership that understands design, branding, such elements of marketing - it will crash due to a kind of ignorant negligence of a key part of the appeal. Maybe they should have kept her. Even the possibly money-loosing 'elementary school' is part of their brand vision without which they might have even more trouble getting the buzz and premium.
I find comfort in the fact you're not a diplomat... I hope
How is it possible that they couldn't get a better deal out of Neumann?

What was he not going to take a quarter of that? If softbank walked his and We's value would have dropped through the floor.

This is so bizarre it feels like there has to be fraud somewhere.
> If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else. (...) Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.

I'd contest that these are largely the same users.

In any case, I support the overall message: it'd be good if Mozilla found additional ways to finance their work, and I'm happy they're actively looking for them.
Are you sure that you're not prejudiced on the side of Hobby Lobby? Because you're defending Hobby Lobby over something that they are not even accused of.
It's a matter of fact that they bought it, without due diligence.
Don't ask this question here, people here who know what is promising won't tell you because that's too valuable information.

Ask your children if you have any.
They will be able to tell you.
Am: Serial entrepreneur of small-ish SaaS and a single big thing. Strong full-stack and business-y stuff.

Want: Business execution/sales. I like SaaS and selling to businesses.

Email: hn@josh.mn
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive, ranty comments to HN? It isn't that you owe dysfunctional companies or dislikeable billionaires any better. But you owe this community better if you want to keep posting here.

There are lots of places on the internet to vent rage. There are not as many to gratify intellectual curiosity. These two things are incompatible. Here we want intellectual curiosity. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking that spirit to heart, we'd appreciate it.
It's great. I have the 100GB level, mostly for pictures being backed up automatically at full resolution.

It is a bummer though, that their tiers go from Free (10GB), 100GB, 200GB, then up to 2TB. That's a huge jump!

Why not have a 500GB, and a 1TB tier?

They could probably get more people to pay them for storage if they offered a 50GB tier at $0.99 like Apple does for iCloud.

The 10GB free tier up to 100GB is a large jump too, and $1.99 a month might be just a little over the threshold for those that don't really use that much data but want phone backups and some pictures, etc.
Sure, that would be great. Processes to do this exist - at higher energy costs. The thermodynamic hill is heavily against you on this.

Cheap fusion or safe cheap thorium reactors would also be great. But an awful lot of smart people have bounced off those problems without success.
India ( NCR, Remote )

I am currently working on a product in the News field and looking for someone who is excited about disrupting how people consume news online.

Email in my profile.
It is exceptionally easy to manage when there's nothing to manage. At that point, managers are superfluous, and the company is wasting money and not maximizing their profits that could benefit from a good manager working with excellent contributors with imperfect dispositions.
https://bearflagrobotics.com/
Even if you're a Liberal supporter, the last thing that you wanted to see last night was another Liberal majority. [1]

Their handling of scandals (Pre-black-face, which was a side-show) was absolutely atrocious, and they could absolutely get away with it, by closing ranks in Parliament. It's one of the big reasons for why the Cons gained 4 percentage points in the popular vote since 2015.

Another four years of an untouchable majority, and they would have stolen everything not nailed down, completely destroyed their public image, only to waltz into the polls, and find to their dismay that this results in another Con government.

Proportionate representation would give Canadian politics the kick in the direction it needs, but unfortunately, the Liberals went back on their promises of electoral reform, once they realized that it would cost them seats.

[1] Edit: It should be noted that Canada has a track record of reasonably functioning minority governments - so government will continue to be able to reasonably... Govern. What it won't be able to continue with, is closing is eyes and ears, to all kinds of cabinet impropriety.
The person writing this seems to be a very clever and capable individual.
That being said, I would imagine a company the size of MSFT would have a senior engineer coding "a security critical network processing agent". That sounds like a lot of responsibility for someone inexperienced.
Have we seen companies get split off in similar circumstances in the past?