skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"note to non-business-savvy readers: this is not even remotely the same kind of thing as personal credit card debt or whatever other completely unrelated thing is making you sanctimoniously kneejerk that "debt is bad". Can we please have an informed discussion of debt as a part of a business capital structure?"

I understand your frustration and, largely, agree with it. You are correct that these are two different things and shouldn't be conflated.

Until they should be.

The two "types" of debt you are drawing a distinction between (or the familiar discussion of national debts vs. household debts, usually in the context of federal spending vs. austerity, etc.) do indeed behave differently under normal circumstances.

In extreme cases, however, these heuristics that you find so primitive and annoying are relevant and actionable. Ignore them at your peril.
I didn't track the time, but I was between four and six hours hands on over the course of a few days. I am probably a bit more fastidious than most builders. Also this doesn't count any research time or shopping time. Probably between eight and sixteen hours invested there.

Bench build with mobo on the desk and each stick of RAM individually, and one pass of memtest86.

Then full build in case. I am fiddly with cable management. Also had some extra fans to install. 3rd gen Threadrippers throw off a lot of heat.

Some BIOS config (biggest thing was adjusting RAM timings and enabling virtualization features).

Then 24 hours of Memtest86.

Install Windows (a lot of benchmarks and stress testing stuff is much easier to just download and go on Windows).

Then 24 hours of Prime95 with hardware sensor monitoring. A few other benchmarks.

Then install Ubuntu.

To be fair, I'd have done the stress testing on a purchased box as well, but that is pretty much hands off.

January was light for me in terms of scheduled work. I didn't explicitly turn something down, but I did take advantage of a gap in my normally billable period (midday on a weekday) to build the machine. If I had wanted to, I probably could have found a way to be billing during that time. I greatly value flexibility in my time.

Could I have gotten done faster? Probably. My mise en place was awful. I was building in a cramped space. I haven't built a machine in quite some time. I also took my time to read the full mobo manual as I was installing and plugging stuff in. But like I said, this is something I enjoy. I was happy to take the time to research and shop around and then build the machine.

The comment on the value of time is more illustrative than a concrete argument. It is worthwhile to consider, especially for someone that doesn't enjoy building a PC. I could have chosen to find billable work instead and devoted that toward purchasing a completed machine. I'd only be a few hundred dollars worse off if I chose to do so. To me, that's a very reasonable price to pay to avoid something undesirable.
Horribly written article -- doesn't go into any detail about the proposal, uses anecdotal data, and author is extremely biased. Seems like the author has an axe to grind. The proposal from Peirce is novel and much superior to the current SAFT framework; The SEC proposal is definitely worth a read.
Whilst I broadly agree with the article it did remind me of mini bonds, a UK centric concept perhaps.

https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/mini-bonds

These havent been getting good press recently due to a number of failures.
The figures in that map at Johns Hopkins are official, confirmed figures. Did you actually look at the map?
Internet users are far too quick to assume that someone who disagrees with them can't possibly be holding their views in good faith, and thus far too quick to reach for sinister explanations like communist propaganda. This projection mechanism is destructive of the discourse we want here, so there's a rule in the site guidelines that explicitly ask you not to do it. Please read them and please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

More explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276554
Satirical artist Cold War Steve asks public to download and exhibit his work
Switch to Simplenote for iOS and then you can sync your Simplenote folder inside Dropbox via nvALT settings.

Now you’ve streamlined your notes.
Panic is - when your "independent" media, repeats propaganda nonsense word for word from chinese state media?

Test your information against samples from people with relations to ground-truth. Then you can panic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5VGPYtbTk8&t=739s
Yeah; that's pretty standard, alas :-(
Stories about poverty and inequality in the U.S.
I admit this is nitpicky, that language is naturally evolving and corporations cannot make rules about how English should be spoken but "Legos" isn't strictly correct. The correct term, per The LEGO Group should be "LEGO bricks". At one point they had this written on their website:

"Please always refer to our products as “LEGO bricks or toys” and not “LEGOS.” By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over"

Also, though "Legos" is somewhat common in North America, it's less common in the rest of the English-speaking world.
For work I used to use Evernote, but these days I just have a folder of markdown files named by date. (20200208.md)

Anytime I run a new command, SQL query or work on a new issue I try to write it down in the note before running it. Then I commit+push everything at the end of the day.

At least for me, knowledge degrades quickly. So having a history of that command I ran to fix X three weeks ago is a life saver.

I've found that better organization isn't really needed because find is good enough and I usually have a vague sense of where I'll find what I'm looking for anyway.

Also these day private GitHub repos are free. So it doesn't cost anything to setup.

For teams you can use runbooks as the same concept. Anytime you on work on an on-call issue record the steps you took to fix it. At Datadog we just used GitHub issues in a dedicated runbook repo, but almost anything could work. The point is to reduce friction as much as possible and eliminate decision points. You can always clean it up later but if the barrier for entry is too high developers won't bother doing it.

Remember this is a developer at their worst - it's 3am, they're fixing something they might know little to nothing about, and they're working as fast as possible under pressure. Any additional procedure needs to be as lightweight as possible.

But if you get it right, man does it make on-call and onboarding easier.
Yeah my comment was less about the panic than it is who seems to be getting hit hard.

There's a lot of mixed information, particularly strange news about cases where folks seem to be recovering and then sort of "relapse" a week or two after it is identified.

The analysis that at least sounds a bit more scientific to me seems to indicate there are a lot of cases where the typically healthy folks are hit hard.
/r/exmormon is a distillation of disgruntled exmembers. It's extremely biased and not representative at all of nearly anything.

Not all exmembers are disgruntled. The ones that aren't disgruntled don't hang out in /r/exmormon.

It's like distilling all of the people in the world who had a bad experience with the police to /r/fthecops and then using anecdotes in there to make assumptions about all police.

Or using anecdotes in /r/atheism to make assumptions about all religion.
Out of curiosity, at the risk of sounding off-topic and irrelevant... but are you an Emacs user?
Damn...

Even though it truly is a solved problem, it's much more intuitive (and fun) to implement a tic-tac-toe solver from scratch using minimax than any lookup tables heuristic.

Since it is a generic solution, I believe the minimax solver can also be easily modified to implement an "AI" player for that Roman version of the game as well, where pieces are removed.

By the way, using minimax was also one of that college task requirements!
I've used a text file with a very similar workflow for a couple years and wholeheartedly agree it's a very flexible and useful tool. The trouble I had was what to do when I'm not in front of my computer. I tried sending myself TODO emails and I'd add them to the list later. That works pretty well. Although typing more than a line on a phone is kinda painful. And it requires the discipline to add the item to the list instead of leaving it in my inbox.

Recently I switched to a physical journal that I carry everywhere. I find a zen like joy in physically writing my thoughts and the portability can't be beat. I do miss the search though. Wish there was a way to combine these two systems without creating more work for me.

Ultimately the best system is whichever one you find it easiest to keep up to date. It's almost like negotiating with my lazy side. "Ok lazy brain, if you're too lazy to keep a list in google docs, let's see if you can get excited about this journal. Look it's got a picture if space on the cover!"
HN is for more than "tech". That's in the first paragraph of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Inevitably, there is political overlap in many of the articles that get posted here—some more, some less. But when there's more, it's particularly important that people stay within the spirit of the site and avoid posting in the flamewar style. Note this rule: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right that it's a tricky situation to navigate when some political topics are allowed, and yet we're still trying to have discussion that doesn't degenerate. I've written a lot in the past about how we approach this. Maybe take a look? If you have questions that I haven't already answered in there somewhere, I'd like to know what they are.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Same here, though I use a combination of permanent and transient TXT files. The latter I use like physical post-it notes.
Sure. But a normal flu can put a healthy person on their backs, too. It won't kill them.
[1] Yet no one has alleged that anything like that has happened. Also if I was 90 years old and had plenty of money I would much rather live a comfortable retired life than work at the pace he works at.
Summarised in the second paragraph. That's all it has for substance.
Mine is a piece of paper. I can even write things to the side, draw diagrams in place, erase, create tables easily.

Paper real estate is also not nearly as limited.

I also use a bug tracker and sometimes a text file, but always have the minutiae on a piece of paper.
You don't really want one, honestly. New Scientist is the Daily Mail of science publications. For anything they might publish, if you can find another source, then that other source is likely to be more accurate and less sensationalized and anything you might have learned in the NS article would be more profitably learned at the other source; and if you can't find another source, it's almost certainly not true.
I've done something similar. Since 2001 I've used txt files, but I broke them up by having 1 file for each month.

It really does work nicely without getting in your way.

I tend not to include specific time logged entries tho. I just free form drop things in. That's why I like having it split up per month, it's so I can look back and get a high level picture of "oh, that's what I was working on 6 months ago" or in this case almost 20 years ago.
I’ve never really gotten into “productivity” apps. Typically my email inbox and calendar combine as my to-do list. Anything in the main inbox still needs to be dealt with. Anything else shows up as a reminder when I need it to. Literally everything work related lives in 1-2 work applications. I intentionally don’t integrate those with my home life. Sometimes I’ll keep a scratch note open in VS code but rarely do I save anything there.
There’s lots of wisdom in old texts. Plato is 2000+ years old. Heroditus. Confucius. Rumi is almost a 1000.

Beckham is a football player and isn’t known for writing down (or saying) wisdom. But I can definitely imagine people reading Marx and Darwin and Hayek 2000 years from now. Biographies and published text.
I do a very similar thing except that I have a folder with multiple .txt files named by dates.
because none has ever received it!
Yes, I retired Evernote when I discovered Vimwiki. I keep wondering, though, am I shortchanging myself by not using org. mode? But I don't know emacs and I am not sure whether it makes sense to make such a costly transition.
It happens like this: you can pay rent without penalty up to say, the fifth of the month. Auto pay is set to come out of your account on the first. Sometimes you need the extra few days to get everything in line, but because everything is so tight and hectic, you forget that you won't actually get to flex those few days, and the payment comes out earlier than you expected.

The timing of payments can be a real burden when you're on the edge. I wrote about a time something similar happened to me a few years back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424493 This is about overdraft fees, specifically, but it's the same principle.
They don't get wealthy from it.

Those who work for the church full time (with the exception of missionaries) receive a stipend to cover their living expenses and not much else.
Create a private podcast that only your employees can access
Also, if you buy a Mac that's a few years old, you still get a great computer at a low, low price. I picked up an 11" air for under $400 off eBay and have used it to build a startup that supported me and my support person. Ran dev tools fine, ran browsers fine, and even though it was years old the battery life was fine.

You don't need the new hotness to get good and useful work done.
I can say in the New York scene the opinion seems to be quite the opposite. There is a non-trivial amount of wariness when it comes to VC money.
> I'm not afraid of the sanitary aspect of this virus. I don't think the mortality is extremely alarming per se.

Agree. It seems to be most like another global strand of flu.
It's even better, 3 month euribor rates are currently negative. So it's a safe way to use their money without "paying" the negative interest rate.
You bring up something that bothers me too. The manipulation of local congregations in order to fund the central corporation is disappointing to say the least. Mormons are often the nicest people you'll find. It's a shame they are expected to express belief in racist, sexist, or other bigoted beliefs in order to be fully acceptable to their in-group.

I point out in another comment that, charitably, congregations receive about 8% of donations back to fund local congregations, often several multiples less. Some congregations I saw send about $25k/week on average for ~200 congregants, and have an $8k budget (about twice that if you account for mainteance, about about $20k when taking charitable giving of food and bill payment into account). What was most disappointing was the training of how to get people with long term needs off of the congregation's dime.

I think the Mormon church would do well to adopt a less centralized form of governance, treasury, and cash management.
Though it isn't free, I switched from nvalt to bear app and I've been very happy with it.
"The jury is still out"? On what, the Rotary club?

Your underlying assumption that churches are unique as providers of social capital in modern society is... peculiar. The fact that churches are tax-exempt is a consequence of the dominant position of the Catholic church in the middle ages, and the compromises made in the subsequent struggle to remove the church bureaucracy from the government.

I expect that as religiousness across the US population declines, churches will gradually be required to behave more like other non-profits. But that will probably take many decades.
Interesting article. The reality is places like Silicon Valley bank do provide debt financing. If your SAAS cash flows look like fixed income, that’s a better way to finance them. There is downside to this too.

The irony is many traditional businesses that use debt (retail?) really should be equity financed.
I have read an opinion that it is just due to the Singapore government working really hard at tracking, containing and reporting all the cases.

That might look like more cases compared to countries that either don't care or under-report.
They did implement a battery EOL warning. What are you blathering about?

It’s been established many times, my argument is not about their initial response, but what they implemented in the next iOS version. A battery control center that tells you your battery’s health, a warning when it’s in bad enough shape that it’s being throttled and needs replacing, the ability to control whether it’s throttled, and a recall/replacement program for affected models.

The initial fix was to throttle the phones, but we all (including myself) agree that was insufficient. But I also believe engineering resources are finite, and I have trouble believing apple would have been able to do the whole control center/notification thing as the first emergency fix.
It's 2020. Why would you still use CDs for digital music?
I agree that WHO is the place to go. Here's the link for their daily reports: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Also, one reason people use other than official reports is that some are more often updated or emphasize more interesting details. One that I found good is https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... which is the one referenced by the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavi...
I read that as "Over four hundred sources for instant answers (the big box at the top) etc. What you usually think of as search results ("traditional links") comes from multiple partners, mostly from Bing (and never from Google, which only leaves Yandex and niche providers)".

That fits well with what GP claimed.
Wow, this guy is biased! Brief selection of non-scammy ICOs:

MakerDAO https://makerdao.com/

Ethereum https://ethereum.org/

Cosmos https://cosmos.network/

Augur http://www.augur.net/

Binance Coin https://www.binance.com/

Basic Attention Token https://basicattentiontoken.org/

By non-scammy, I mean projects that 1) Raised money via ICO, 2) Delivered what they promised, and 3) [a huge bar!] are succeeding! Even if 99% are scams, the successes make up for the failures, which appears to be similar odds to normal startups.

I would absolutely say that ICOs are way too founder-friendly, but to say every single one of them is a pump-and-dump scam is ridiculous.

I would also say that VC funding is far too investor-friendly, and it makes me happy that the pendulum swung in the opposite direction for once. I think the market will find a better medium, which is what the SEC is proposing with their safe harbor.

This author seems extremely unhappy that Bitcoin is about to hit $10,000. The "never-crypto" people are losing their minds...
I would imagine that the moneychangers were paying some amount to the church.

I think the issue was that the church was being used as a place for worldly pursuits.
I think the key difference is the Church's system is voluntary and communism is not voluntary.
Ask HN: Java, C, C++, or Python for cross-platform GUI and tools?
Hello HNers,

Lately I've been thinking about my "software/digital situation" through observing my daily habits. I've been hoarding data (e-mails, pictures, docs, passwords, todos, notes, etc) that are stored in the cloud through mostly reliable free services.

As I get older, I noticed that I've become a little bit concerned with the situation where I may not be able to use this services due to the usual reasons folks shared in HN.

I've been considering one path to get out of this situation: use local-first app (desktop/console/web-app). The only thing I have to be careful is the data format: they should be standard data format such as: txt, pdf, [png,jpeg,etc for pics], open-file-format such as ODF. I know there are tons of FOSS desktop/console apps/host-yourself-web-app out there but there is a small caveat: I'd like to stick with them for as long as I can with minimum upgrade cycle :) so that if the software has been abandoned, I don't want to deal with the situation where the base OS upgraded and the software no longer works.

I wouldn't mind using dropbox/rsync/tarsnap in order to resolve the sync situation whether real-time sync or daily backups.

Given these parameters, there is a good possibility that I might have to write my own tools to solve certain personal workflow.

Would you recommend Java, C, C++, or Python for cross-platforms software/tooling and why?
Java: I have strong background in Java, love the tools+ecosystem. Caveats: JRE, Oracle, new language feature churns (I can choose not to)
C/C++: only touched them in college, tools aren't great, willing to learn, need guidance for best-practices/minimize effort. Lots of folks I admired stick with C/C++ to build their tools. I respect that. C/C++ based-software seemed to require minimum upgrade too (not too many dependency)
Python: Used Python occasionally. Caveats: small concern with upgrade story (Python2-Python3->future, lib binding).

Thoughts?
In the denser parts of Switzerland, apartments are very common. I don’t see how solar works when people are living in a 5 story building. I couldn't see solar working that well where I lived in Lausanne, for example, at least on a person housed/energy unit basis.
Unless number increase by a factor 10 since February 7th official, confirmed cases in China are 31,211. Source: WHO situation report from Feb. 7th.

EDIT: Counter point to the infected population in the hundreds of thousands you made in the parent.

EDIT 2: Misread 100s or 1000s for hundreds of thousands. So yeah, official numbers.
Just because you can draw a parallel between the two doesn’t necessarily make it exploitative. Most of the time I’m sure both sides win, the creator gets to follow their passion, the viewer gets to feel they had a part in it by paying some money. There is certainly a potential for exploitation and indoctrination, but that’s really only in extreme cases.
How Clay Christensen’s failure helped me process my own
People have, it just doesn't hit home like seeing the $100B figure.[0]

[0] https://davidvbartosiewicz.blogspot.com/2010/12/lds-apostles...
Media Is Broken
Greenspun's 11th Law:

"Any sufficiently complicated note-taking/productivity/GTD system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org-Mode."
Somebody has going to be the a**hole that tells you the truth
A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.
Sponsoring 50 record labels
One is a lot more defensible than the other. Having $100B cash on hand would just be stupid. Having invested $100B could be seen as more like an endowment if they produce income.
> Generally I’m with you but in the case of religion, I think it’s a bad idea to tax one’s belief in God.

What's the taxable income or capital gains of a belief, exactly?
To define a electric standard, before a society is electrified and set the wheels in motion for others to adhere to it - is a bad idea?

It always needs to be a Edison vs Tesla war, before things are settled?