skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The two should be facing exactly the same pressure from Amazon, so the reasons for Fry's failures has to be more nuanced than "internet retailers are sucking everyone dry."

One possibility is that Fry's didn't focus enough on it's core competency: computer components for enthusiasts. Last I was there they were selling a bunch of very tangentially related things, like a lot of kids toys.

That's the kind of stuff that nobody really cares so much about seeing before they but them, so easy for online retailers to serve.

Seems like many successful post Amazon businesses focus on a particular niche. Of course, I imagine that with their huge retail buildings, Fry's had to fill them with something to justify the cost of that space.

Retailers are just as much selling an experience as they are selling goods. The novelty of the Fry's experience just wore off for most people. Believe it or not there was a time when people would take their families there all weekend long as an outing.

People just aren't as impressed with consumer technology now as they were then ... and they're sort of right. The changes in recent years haven't been that wonder-inducing from a consumer perspective.
Games are very un-'clean'. They can stop working just a few years after release and they don't support any kind of developments in the platform (framerate limits, resolution limits, OS support). Understandable, there's no financial reason to support a game that won't sell anymore, except they're also hostile to passionate users who would do it themselves if things were opened up a bit.
Ask HN: Which startups are still “only hiring the best”?
Does that phrase still have any meaning? It’s hard to imagine someone who might be considered “the best” deciding to work at an early stage company.
Thank you for the explanation... very impressive and beautiful
I have real trouble wrapping my head around this kind of thing because I can't imagine paying for a product under those circumstances, no matter how useful it'd be. I get that it must work since so many people say it does, but it's totally alien to me.

If you don't have something to sell me, now, why are you asking for money? Am I an investor? No? Come back when you have a product. I'll probably still say no because I won't expect your business to last very long, but you'll be 100x closer to a "yes" than you are now, which is about as far from it as you could possibly be. Is this an unusual attitude?
> Also RabbitMQ is absolute crap. There are better options for every scenario so I advise using something else like Redis, NATS, Kafka, or Pulsar

Yikes, that's a bit harsh! I've been using RabbitMQ on multiple projects for several years, and I think it's a great pub/sub system. It also has a large userbase and community around it, as well as lots of plugins available.

I've never heard of using Redis for pub/sub - were you suggesting rolling your own on top of Redis? I'm not familiar with NATS (but it's been mentioned several times here, so I will definitely learn more!), but Kafka is a streaming log/event system, not a pub/sub system like RabbitMQ (different use cases).

I will say though that if something is wrong in your RabbitMQ config, the stack traces that Erlang produces when it crashes are a nightmare to decipher!
There is a tendency to undervalue recent advancements because they haven't had the same amount of time to demonstrate an impact on the world.

I would point to the 2010's as the rise of two phenomena:

- Social networking and meme culture

- Explosive growth of software

These will prove to be just as important as the developments of the 2000's, but haven't had the time for other developments to build on them.
Food safety is a lot more complicated than time and temperature. Guidelines like the USDA's are simplified and overzealous to the point of harm IMO. Leftover pasta in tomato sauce in a takeout container in a car overnight has probably never made anyone sick. Pasta in cream sauce might spoil, but again probably perfectly safe from the standpoint of pathogens. Meanwhile, a raw lettuce salad stands a reasonable chance of making you sick even if always stored according to the guidelines.
Don’t join a server without an admin. Problem solved. I wouldn’t join some random server hosted by the game publisher where there are no admins and no votebans.
fun to see ntlite still kicking
(Why?:Lisp)
At the time nobody was thinking about that though. Times change, we get smarter, new flaws are exposed, etc.
Nim a Childhood Mathematical Game
> Should my employer have the right to impose a curfew on me so that I'm not tired the next day at work?

I bet the military has done that for centuries. Though I wouldn't want companies too start drafting people.
> At my company, all the software that we use is web-based (SaaS), with the exception of software engineers, who are using local tools to develop web based applications.

And interestingly, Google has a clear "complementary solution" to ChromeOS for software-engineering use cases: Google Cloud Shell (https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/), which gives you a "personal POSIX environment as web-app."

I feel like ChromeOS and GCP have an obvious idiomatic relationship to them, sort of like Windows and Azure do.
We already have drug testing in many industries, particularly shipping.

https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Drug...
Perhaps so, but over 400 million people speak English as a native language whereas I'd guess those who spoke Swedish at most would be only 10% of that number.

That said, as a native English speaker, I'm not defending the goddam language it's such a mess you'd reckon it'd been through a blender. About the only thing going for English (other than its ubiquity) is that there is essentially one indefinite article to remember (unlike all the different and nefarious genders of many other languages).

On the matter of counting, irrespective of what you say, unlike the ancient Romans, we have all inherited a number system that includes zero—and that zero is added on the tenth digit (not the eleventh). If you wish to count or do mathematics in a different system other than in our common base-10 one then you have every right to do so. However, I, like most other people, have taken the easy way out and adopted the counting system that puts this "0" thing on the 'last' [already-repeating] number before the counting system repeats. (Right, I agree with you, it is strange but I can't think of an alternative other than to kick out the "0" and go back to the Ancient Roman way of doing things. Reckon though it'd be pretty clumsy. I reckon I'd truly struggle to do say vector calculus or square root by the long method in Roman numerals. I just shudder at the thought.

But as they say it's horses for courses, I signed off my recent Christmas cards in Roman numerals as I always do, last year just past being MMXIX.

You may have invented a better system but I'm damn sure it'll take a lot of convincing others to change the world's most common numbering system (despite its quirky faults—that, of course, is if you actually view them as faults). :-)
I think the broader point here is not having control over something you bought. Like why not give the user the choice to opt out of telemetry or even non-essential auto-updates (like Debian)?
The USPS absolutely has a legally enforced monopoly in the textbook sense of the word. It's just not over the entire market of letter and package delivery.

> The USPS actually has two legally enforced monopolies, as per Title 39 of the US Code. One is over the delivery of anything defined as a “letter,” which is within certain size and weight limits. The second is over the use of your mailbox...there are criminal violations if anyone puts anything in your mail box that is not US government approved “mail.

> ...parcels were never subject to the delivery monopoly. Indeed, UPS was in that business first, and USPS entered afterwards. ...This is why DHL, FedEx, Amazon... and others are free to enter and exit the parcel business. It is defined as a different market.

> FedEx is another fascinating story. There was a need for express document delivery among professional services, such as law firms (this was of course long before e-mail). The USPS was too slow and unreliable. FedEx and Fred Smith threatened to litigate the issue to death...so the USPS allowed an exception in the delivery monopoly for “extremely urgent material.”

https://fee.org/articles/an-expert-explains-the-postal-monop...
Thankfully C++ is far from the only language that compiles to native.

Many others don't even have the same insane "features".
He's saying its one Schizo lawsuit away from being a proxy for discrimination.

"We can't not hire black people but we forbid coconut oil hair product use among employees" How well do you think that would go over in a court?
Interesting, thanks. SML is my only direct exposure to the family, and I recall a conference speaker mentioning that ML (perhaps SML) programmers weren't fond of the feature.
How is Xubuntu in any way stateless? It has a full local filesystem with a package manager and everything, lots of ways it can be messed up, no?
Your ear is bleeding.
Game and console companies would love it if users only had dumb terminals with DRM protected input and output, and they're working towards that dream: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/03/19/e3-2018-the-rise-of-...
Shouldn't we in the West help them to not be so well-controlled and authoritarian? Otherwise, what are we doing?
I agree that that explains some of the difference. Not sure it means that he isn't the most impressive.

I'd also add that in his stints at different firms pre-Amazon he was quite clearly an outlier among high-achievers.
> I had literally nothing to say to that.

I think this is literally why salesmen exist.

One of my good friends is a real estate agent and he is helping me find a house. My job is to complain about every place we see. Every single time he finds a way to spin my complaint into a positive or something constructive. Roof leaky? You can get it fixed for $X dollars and we can work that into an agreement.

For a great salesman there is no objection that cannot be overcome.
If your other preferred client is the Mac, you have the same challenge with Apple. Their entire mac product line is only 10% of their revenue.
Well I guess the problem is everyone else uses the store in the same way.
Neither virtual assistants nor deep fakes can be considered "the next big thing". They're in their infancy.
This is A+ language to hide that he simply wants to hire people with the same worldview/mindset as himself irrespective of qualifications and civil service rules.

Telling also that this is posted on his private blog, not an official government site. He will rip the country apart, make a huge profit for himself and his friends (like Farage) and leave a bloody mess. Damage for decades as we see already now with Britain's conflicted population (huge rift in particular between pro/against Brexit people and on a lot of other lines) but at an institutional scale and reach.

How are this kind of people allowed into power...
Don't worry about supported by Neverware. Mine Mac Pro also isn't supported last time I checked. But it works flawlessly.
I'm not missing anything, I'm responding to a specific claim--that libraries allow C to compensate for missing language features. This is patently false irrespective of the merits of the features in question.

That said, I think your entire criteria for determining whether a language or feature is good boils down to its intuitiveness to experienced C programmers, which seems like a particularly poor, subjective criteria and it probably doesn't actually even hold for C considering all of the security issues and undefined behaviors that are introduced by and continue to surprise experienced C programmers.

For my money, closures, pattern matching, and templates (not any implementation in particular) are easy enough to reason about and much better than the corresponding bugs they address, but to each his own.
I think nuclear will have a resurgence... in some places. I keep hearing that nuclear is safer than coal but coal won't make entire regions uninhabitable if something goes REALLY wrong. I'm thinking terrorist attacks, natural disasters, missile strikes, etc.
I would say, sorry for your loss.

This story is fantastic, honest and educational. Clearly the author is smart, yet this doesn't prevent him from making some stupid mistakes. I know it is obvious, but this story is very educational.

Thank you for writing this.
[heart-eyes emoji]
"All your stuff is up in the cloud."

What happens if the knowledge worker loses their connection to the "cloud".
Boy swallows AirPod wireless earbud, ends up in hospital
I think the enlightenment of psychedelics is often oversold, but it isn't naught either. These experiences are one way of proving to yourself that your perceptions are not a clear window, they're more like stained glass. The majik is when you realize how to mold and shape that stained glass such that it leads you to make better decisions, and gain more control over your own experience.
The article does a good service explaining that part.
What a nice century we live in that we have time for describing and discussing these kind of problems. :)
10 is by far the most implausible. Cargo pants will continue to be awful. But pocket-less pants will take off
What does that value add look like to you?

I own a few SaaS sites that I bought (because I don’t have the patience and focus to build one myself) that I then work to increase the value of (based on lessons from a previous SaaS company I worked at), and I’m always interested in private equity arrangements.
PM's are gold or garbage, there is almost no in-between.

You want on boarding, monetization, metrics, goals attempted, successes and most importantly "what failed".

Let me say "metrics" again, what are they measuring, how, and what is and isn't working in NUMBERS. (If you don't have these god help you)

While your looking at things from a customer perspective, you should be looking at things from a storage perspective.

Where ever your data is stored, it is likely you can auto generate a schema from some sort of tool. Make these, print them out, hang them on the wall. Why dead trees? Because your going to wanna write notes on it, if you can't it's useless.

Why does storage matter? Because knowing what is there, and was there and how its laid out are going to give you massive clues as to how the system evolved! Column order in a lot of DB's is a hint at what came later. Is current critical data tacked on to the end of a table? Is there something you THINK you should be there sparsely populated because it is unused today or simply not required.

Wireframes are fast an easy, even if you do them one paper and scan them in later. I can't say enough how much having movable pieces for your work flow can help. Doing these as your learning and getting feedback on what's missing from that PM is going to give you massive insight and expose dark corners and missing thinking.
Agreed, if someone asks me to use she instead of he, or they instead of <whatever>, I'm good with it. Anything else is actual bigotry as there's just no other reasonable reason to not comply.

I also think we get worked up about things that live on the edges. Extreme viewpoints either way which are battled out on the internet, but don't represent the opinions of most people.

The new pronouns though... I don't know, that may take me a while.
It’s basically impossible. Unpowered hub motors drag a lot. Unpowered mid-drives are better because they have clutches or freewheels, but you’re still pedaling a fifty-pound bike. Some ebikes do have regeneration triggered by brake lever switches but it’s pretty rare. Others have a regeneration mode switch. Most just don’t bother.

What you should understand about these bikes is the power delivered by the motor, and the power needed to recharge batteries in a useful time frame, greatly exceeds the continuous power a human would normally exert on the pedals.
Not only that, but have you ever tried shopping for something like a laptop on Amazon? The descriptions are all three lines long and by the time you figure out what the hell you're buying you could just drive to Best Buy and see a display that clearly explains what's on offer.
I'm really glad your phones haven't broken, and hope that mine was a QA issue. Incidentally, here's the video I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGA_NNR3kDs
The real answer that already exists to "having a thin client with native Excel" is to stand up a Windows Server instance with Excel installed and a Citrix gateway, and have your thin clients connect to it. My bank does it.
Having working in the anti-cheat field, lot of people here have no ideas how it really works and the implications of banning people.

I can tell you that DICE ( Shield ~~ ) have a dedicated team of people and it's not an easy problem to solve.
I grew up during the Doom 1 era, Quake, CS1.3+, etc and IIRC most if not all had vote kicks before p2p servers and removing server browsers became a thing (I'll probably wind up listing a game that didn't have vote kicking, it's been a long time). I used to admin some game servers. You'd occasionally have vote kick trolls but honestly that caused a lot less drama than keeping a toxic-player/cheater around who would eventually drain the server of players. If the servers ever drained we'd have to throw in bots just so people would even join it again and nobody wants that. We had to do a LOT of IP bans of problem players and occasionally we'd block entire ISPs.

The best thing about these systems was servers would build communities that would self-admin and deal with the drama, for instance Tactical Gamers TF2 servers were my favorite place to play by far.

I don't consider vote kicking to be some fantastic anti-cheat mechanism and the developers still need to provide a lot of support in that area but it definitely helps bridge the gap between reporting cheats and the cheat vectors being closed (if they ever are).

edit: I've only done this on PC games. No idea how well this works in the console community.
If there's anything to browse beyond water bottles, VGA cables, phone cases and year old DVDs, then your local Fry's is doing much better than the one I visited in early December.
Have Aliens Found Us? (2019)
Just my personal experience that the vast majority of "letter mail" is junk that I don't want at all. It's actually a hassle to have USPS deliver junk and have to walk down the block to retrieve it, to turn right around and drop it in the trash. If I could forgo USPS delivery and just get stuff dropped in my front door (like UPS and FedEx do), I'd be better off.
All of the unnecessary punctuation makes this article difficult to read.
There's so many inputs that it's difficult to casually come up with an intuition-guided estimate. So it makes some sense to have faith in the empirically guided value. We hope that they took the time to validate their algorithm for extrapolating the energy consumption.
The rotation artifacts you see are a result of the very simple algorithm and the property of the viewing triangle. It renders objects that are farther away when they are near the border of the viewing screen.
> What's the ambient temperature just half a meter below ground during a fire?

Fire can actually go down and spread underground.
I think there's a trend back to B&M (so called omnichannel) but even so, it is definitely not B&M retail as usual. Successful B&M retailers are finding they have to evolve to include BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup in Store), a digital store experience [1], price-matching, etc.

There's something about being able to browse, touch and discover new things that the online experience doesn't provide. Even Amazon's strategy includes B&M these days [2] (Amazon Books, Amazon Go, Amazon 4-star, Whole Foods, etc. -- all of these can be found in the Chicago area and other parts of the country)

[1] New retail technologies:

https://www.retaildive.com/topic/technology/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/find-your-store/b/?node=17608448011
The Trinity study (which is where the oft-quoted 4% rule seems to have originated) is assuming a max of about 30 years of withdrawals before the money is depleted. If people are retiring early, it isn't clear what a reasonable withdrawal rate would be.

>...The 4% refers to the portion of the portfolio withdrawn during the first year; it is assumed that the portion withdrawn in subsequent years will increase with the consumer price index (CPI) to keep pace with the cost of living. The withdrawals may exceed the income earned by the portfolio, and the total value of the portfolio may well shrink during periods when the stock market performs poorly. It is assumed that the portfolio needs to last thirty years. The withdrawal regime is deemed to have failed if the portfolio is exhausted in less than thirty years and to have succeeded if there are unspent assets at the end of the period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study

(Also the wikipedia article has a number of criticisms of the study.)
You don’t need cars in order for a helmet to be important.

An acquaintance of mine was killed running into a slightly raised piece of ground that he didn’t see... wasn’t wearing a helmet and was thrown over his handlebars. Doctors say he would have walked away if he had been wearing a helmet.
Just leaving "The Ultimate Acorn Archimedes talk" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf67JYkUCHQ
I don't think it's parody at all. I think he's laughing in retrospect at his true emotions as a naïve developer who had read too much HN.
Why wouldn't they make it [[strict]] by default?
How do you know that?

(Also, if true, that still makes smoking not a binary)
I've been toying with the idea of using Tailwind (I currently use Bulma), but I'm concerned about it taking more dev time than necessary. Would love to hear people's experiences!
Easy workaround -- let the AI come up with the idea and then put a human's name on it. Done and done.
Define “best.” Each company has its own definition, and you probably have a definition that’s different from all of those. Besides, why wouldn’t someone who’s great at what they do start a company? Early stage startups are the best place to get a large chunk of equity which could be very valuable later on if you succeed at building a business.
The whole list reminded me of the film Idiocracy. Any/all of these would fit perfectly into that movie.
They admitted it that it was fake.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50979557
They don't specifically break out numbers pre and post-redesign, but first full year with the new design was 2019, during which there was a:

* 30% increase in monthly active users

* 37% increase in comments

* 53% increase in views

https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-revie...
How is Delta not jumping on supporting their employees on this? They don't have much to lose by chastising a supplier, yet a lot to gain in service quality from people being comfortable at their job. It makes no sense from a business PoV... is Delta somehow profiting on these uniforms or what?
Uh? Have you seen the price of AAA games?
It isn't the same challenge because Apple doesn't sell Macs at a loss.
Quite easily; who wants to sift through all that? However, it turns out if you charge higher prices and have knowledgeable employees, many people will take advantage of the employees' guidance, then go home and order the same thing on Amazon for less.
How dare adults do to their bodies what they want!
Came here to post exactly the same.
You CAN write human readable html!
I believe the loot system changes in WoW were inspired by occurrences of groups of people joining matchmaking together, then kicking a person after the boss died and taking all the stuff for themselves. I only saw this sort of behavior firsthand once or twice, but I’ve heard from others who thought it was widespread.