skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey - congrats on launching! I'm adding Posthog to my list of codebases to check out.

Can you talk more about your tech stack?

As an aside - it seems like most of the analytics companies I've heard of went through YC: MixPanel, Heap, Amplitude!
This article had more detail and substance than I usually find on TechCrunch or startup coverage in general. I do want to point out two things that bothered me in the article:

1. Using the word “raise” when talking about financing via debt seems inappropriate and very start-upy. This is a low cost of capital line of credit, is it not (due to their infrastructure and broad customer base)?

2. Why in the world are statements like this not met with scorn? “... scale to $1 billion in revenue in the next five years, and it will become free cash flow profitable (something the CEO also referred to, loosely, as profitability) in the next two.“

On point #2 - thats NOT profitability. Thats called “Cash Flow Positive”, and its an incredible achievement, but definitions matter. In my opinion, “cash flow profitable” isn’t a real thing (its “cash flow positive”), but the real issue is - cash flow positive ≠ profitability.

Edit: On why definitions matter, recall WeWork “Community Adjusted EBITDA”.

Edit #2: The Author knows that the CEO is making stuff up, which is why this bothers me. It’s evident by the parenthetical disclaimer, “...(something the CEO also referred to, loosely, as profitability)”.... Then call the CEO out, Alex Wilhelm (author), if you think its BS!
2019 Transparency Report
Bagel Street Cafe?
I gotta admit, there's one tiny bit of this that I think is kinda cool: the secondary "Sharetown" ecosystem does sound like an "afterburner" of sorts for unused product, and I much rather see products be up-or-re-cycled than tossed in landfill. I think there is a much larger market for this, especially as TFA says about the huge increase in returns.
Aha, that's an interesting point: is the current SDV paradigm "build a faster horse", to quote Henry Ford?
Why Have Humans Always Loved Beans?
Climate change has really become a catch all for any negative environmental trends at this point.
'2 hours lunch break and 1hr for prayer breaks' and the work is low quality.

You don't need to track those people, you need to replace them.
Announcing the Insomnia REST Client Plugin Hub 1.0
I don't think Signal should replace email. I don't think email is going anywhere.
Building infrastructure is complicated. Have you found an easier way then Ansible to accomplish building infrastructure?

Ansible does make yaml more complicated, however, you don't need to use much of that complexity for simple projects. Compared to Terraform, Chef, Google Deployment Manager, and Windows Desired State Configuration, Ansible is by far the simplest to get up and running on to do real work with.
The Holder DoJ never weighed in on this case at all, to my knowledge. This is a civil suit.
Yes, Trump distracts with those things while his administration does the consequential stuff. Whether that's a deliberate strategy or just a personally corrupt buffoon who has put the worst of the worst in subordinate position with no meaningful central strategy except for impulsive reshuffles and dismissals is...ultimately unimportant to the end result.
The entire financial system would disappear.
What the Hell Is That Device, and Is It Spying on You?
In the end who cares, everyone would have been way happier without resorting to big brothery solutions and solving anyway he problem. But no, we gotta chase that additional profit at the cost of any other metric!
Not really. The time scale for large movement is much larger than thousands of years.

Since the great pyramid was build 4500 years ago the mid atlantic ridge has only moved about 100m. That's just lateral translation, most of which probably did not end up moving egypt much anyway and definitely not enough to throw off the direction a pyramid is pointing by more than a second or two.
Would likely be a private equity leveraged buy out transaction, someone who leans out the operation and squeezes the margins up.

Anyone with tech chops has their own cloud, and DO isn’t even cash flow positive yet. Thoughts and prayers to anyone with common stock (which isn’t looking too good at an exit).
It is super effective. I was in FL last weekend and the tv stations were flooded with ads; the positive tone seeps into your brain whether you like it or not.
It's amazing anyone buys used mattresses. The likelihood of getting bedbugs and pounds of a stranger's skin flakes is very high. Gross!
Proper power management and Wi-Fi. I have a Chromebook with Ubuntu that has well-supported OSS drivers but which won’t boot Haiku at all.
The sentiment expressed by many in this thread would flip 180 degrees if Zuck e.g. one day woke up and decided he doesn't like commies (which would be a very reasonable, and amply justified opinion, in my view), and had his underlings at Facebook censor the entirety of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign from the network.

My position on the issue is simple: if a site owner censors/throttles/shadowbans/detrends/etc _any_ legal speech, they're a publisher, and and they should be liable for the stuff that remains on their site. Don't want that? Be a carrier and don't censor legal speech. Nothing could be easier.
Yeah I bought one for 175 bucks, just as a temporary thing. I love it. I’ll never pay 1000 dollars for a mattress again
Also the key stupidity that made all this possible is a lesson worth remembering after RSA is forgotten.

The RSA tokens are essentially a random number plus form factor. It isn't necessary for the manufacturer to know what the number inside each token is, let alone to store that after the product ships.

But of course it's tempting to do so as a convenience for your customers. Once you set off down this slippery slope you're a dead man walking.

A FIDO token likewise is a random number plus (somewhat more complicated) form factor. If anybody makes RSA's mistake it has the exact same consequences (big hole in your security for whoever knows the number). Hopefully the decisions in FIDO to eliminate conveniences for knowing the magic number, plus RSA's example has been enough that nobody is dumb enough but we shall see.
Don Gorske
KDE’s Plasma Mobile Is Shaping Up Nicely on the PinePhone
You don't treat reasonably your tools. That's how some companies see their employees.
I'm actually using this with Metabase and the two compliment each other really nicely!

Also, thanks for making something really cool :)
Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things and why should someone be legally punished for it?

Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?
A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170733
It's both. Ellison is fundraising for Trump (ironic how an actual billionaire is helping subsidize a fake one to re-election), and Trump is technologically an imbecile who doesn't use email and uses Twitter...poorly.
I have a pair!

But throwing away valuable stuff is still waste. If you can help someone a great deal for next to nothing, that’s worth doing. Forgoing that help and then making donations elsewhere is nice I guess, but it’s still wasteful.
Ofgassing in the first few weeks or so may expose you to harmful chemicals, but I don't see any reason for foam the to degrade into fine particulate if it isn't exposed to UV, assuming it isn't made of total garbage.
It is, but I doubt that many who lived through this era would say that "any hint of sex parity was absent".

A friend related a story from about this time. Their parents were traditional--he worked and she ran the household. One day at dinner he dared opine that the sauce could use more salt. She picked up her ladle and gave him a sharp whack to the side of the head. And never again did that happen. Not parity exactly, but she got to do what she wanted to do in life, and she ruled her domain to a degree that most of us can only dream of (including today's women).
New Neanderthal remains associated with the ‘flower burial’ at Shanidar Cave
So you're saying retail is offensive the moral sensibilities of a sociopath?
Are blockchains inefficient if you’re not using proof of work? I thought it was the latter that was a source of inefficiency, and you don’t need PoW on a permissioned network.
Arguably, Academic Torrents is closer to what GitHub does than the product in question. I don't know why they compare it to GitHub TBH.
What Is Mobile PureOS?
Conversations, Xabber, Chatsecure. Any of these is more secure than Signal: they are not tied to phone numbers (means: way more privacy), work with TOR easily, and starting a secure conversations is no more difficult than 'add contact' (enter contact XMPP id) -> 'press lock' -> you're ok, chat is private, and your phone number is not exposed.

Actually, this phone number thing is the main reason why I find it hard to suggest using Signal to anyone who's life is on the line.
Well yeah, an absolute ton of things would disappear if we essentially made every company a sole proprietorship.
> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact.

assuming you actually do this - which i dont believe you do but will accept for argument's sake - it is entirely meaningless. mouth-sounds are not important in and of themselves; you hear the mouth-sounds and interpret them to try and guess how that person will act in the future. you are building a predictive model of that person.

lets say there is a video of a politician (clumsily) saying "i am a rapist hater. i will increase the punishment to try and dissuade these awful crimes and make all our lives safer". You argue it is a true fact that politician is on video saying "i am a rapist". My point is that "true" in this sense is nonsense, and furthermore "true" in any absolute sense is always nonsense.

if your head is a list of quotes people have said that simply don't feed into your impression of them, then you are in a minority so small its effectively 0 on a global scale.
How the English Found Cannabis
Am I correct in thinking this is an EBITA situation?

You can be making money and paying it all to Uncle Sam and your bank loans. 100 million is gonna be a lot of interest payments.
You can report what OS/GPU/etc you use, which might help find an important correlation.
This title is a garden-path sentence. In the context of computer UI, "dock" is usually a noun. I had to read it a couple of times before I understood what was meant.

Swapping the clauses or using a comma would have clarified everything
A 2 hours lunch break is the standard in France.
I'm not a manager, but if I were I'd probably try to track their goals and projects foremost, and let them manage their time under those constraints.
Yeah, there may have been other long term benefits that were not accounted for in the cost comparison. For example, people like to shop at places with happy employees. The commenter mentioned that the place doesnt exist any more.
> What was the cost difference?

Doesn't matter. I bet it adversely affected someone's bonus and that was why it was scrapped.
What to do when you reach #1 on Hacker News
I'm going by what the article said.
> There is a difference between deciding all transactions will be published and making them public by design constraint.

In a "blockchain" with a centralized validator set, there's no constraint forcing transactions to be public. The network will keep running even if the validators decide to stop publishing transactions. It's very much still a social contract.

Tampering (adding false transactions) is the only thing that could be hampered thanks to the requirement of client signatures: transaction/partial information censoring will still be possible. But in reality such a system will have the design constraint that funds must be seizable by the government, which in turn negates the only remaining technical advantage of a "centralized blockchain".

All that's left is the now empty word "blockchain". It's going to fit perfectly next to "democracy".
Custom Environment Values in SwiftUI
What should be the response of workers?
Well, it is to me.
AWS CDK would be an example of using a programming language rather than a DSL to build infra.
Perhaps. But who gets to decide which side of the line any given statement is on? Imagine, for example, that the person appointed to decide that is an anti-vaxxer. Or that they just left a gig at Monsanto/Bayer, and feel like all claims that Roundup/glyphosate might cause some harm to someone are blatantly false. Or the person appointed was a Democratic activist. Or a Republican activist. Pick your poison. And now this person is given the power to decide which claims are blatantly false, as opposed to grey.

While there are claims that are black and white, and claims that are grey, empowering someone to enforce that clearly-false claims cannot be published is going to bite you, because that person is going to have their own perspectives, biases, and (probably) agenda. It takes something close to a saint to not inflict their own agenda, and saints are in short supply.
Set expectations on the work, not over what periods in the day it's done.
I’m really skeptical that Republicans know or care about politics in Google’s work culture. I think the only big story to come out about it, the James Damore one, mainly got discussed from a gender angle and most Republican politicians would prefer if that conversation didn’t happen at all.
how many hands do you have :)

The story could largely be reduced to: Giant Multinational sues Giant Multinational; both gain support of other Giant Multinationals while World's Most Powerful Government sides with plaintiff Giant Multinational.

The EFF needs to 100,000x larger to influence this level of game.
I don't see anything about the structure of the debt. Wish we could see more details.
I don’t know why your comment is being downvoted. That was my understanding as well. A distributed ledger is much harder to tamper with, which is why “blockchain technology” is actually a reasonable solution to this problem, IMO. I am open to being proven wrong, though
Thanks so much! It's built on pretty simple/proven technologies: Postgres, Django and React. We've already seen this scale to millions of daily events on basic Heroku dynos. We can swap in other databases if you end up going beyond that.
Yes. But in this case that debt will be raised by selling bonds versus borrowing from an institution.

Edit - read it closer, it seems they are borrowing from commercial lenders. In which case I have no idea why they used the word 'raised', as it usually implies bond sales.
> Or you just pick papers that support your viewpoint for the sake of argument?

This. (Actually I believe both numbers are optimistically correct: 1 million infected and 50k death, but I also realize that's crazy talk and panic time. If that is what is really happening in Hubei I would quarantine 10% of the world's population).
That is more or less what TFA says: "Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity." "Irreducible" means a bound, but it does not mean a constant.

The name is misleading to a scientist, who has a specific understanding of what "conservation" means. And in particular, a very specific notion of what a "conservation law" is. Which this does not follow.

Getting past the name, it's a useful adage. But the name adds unneeded complexity, placing a burden on people who are forced to learn a different intention for a well-understood term.
Who is downvoting this guy and why are you downvoting him? This makes perfect sense. This isn't Reddit where you upvote/downvote based on your opinion, you downvote if the information isn't factual.
"They first appeared as tape transport symbols on reel-to-reel tape decks during the mid-1960s." See https://gizmodo.com/the-secret-histories-of-those-ing-comput..., which is linked to from this article which you may also find interesting: https://medium.com/@mwichary/the-ghost-tech-in-todays-langua...
I never managed to like unity or godot because they remove freedom from the developer. Your code becomes a second class citizen.

Apparently level design people and artists like it, which makes sense, of course, since indie gamedevs and small teams who are full of ideas and content, want to work as quickly as possible.

But as a developer, I just loathe those tools. They sort of make sense for non-developers who want to make a prototype game and "tweak" things by writing as little code as possible while getting bleeding edge graphics. In reality it just enables unambitious projects so that "anybody can make games". It's like comparing LEGO to mechanical engineering. Of course, if you're pedantic, a LEGO car fits the definition of a car. You can sell a lego car, and then you realize how twisted the indie video game market is right now.

But if you want to make a game, those WYSIWYG things are horrible. They're viable, but if you have some issue or limitation with the tool, you're really stuck. If there's a performance problem, it becomes more difficult. If you want to release on console, there are additional steps and work to do. You cannot "use what you want", because it's a huge generic blob of things that you cannot really understand how it's made.

I watched a video about the internals of godot and was not convinced at all. Of course it's open source but it's a giant mess. Unity is not even open source.

I will always show this video each time those WYSIWYG tools are talked about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y

It's the 40 years old debate "should I use this feature rich framework to make the website of my grandma?". The answer is "you either care about your ability to write code, or you don't.". Simple as that.

Another result is a large bubble in the video game market. There are just too many games. In a way, it helps people gaining experience, but even many of the great games are often very short lived. I think it will give a bad reputation to platforms like Steam etc.
Completely agree with his points here. What I see is an online education platform is going to be the disruptor here. The ba, ma, PhD will be disrupted by this platform. This platform does not exist yet....but when it comes it will be something like Netflix which people don't take serious at first, traditional academics will tell you why traditional University is better but young people will flock to it and the final capitulation will occur when employers accept this platform's credentials over traditional degree. This will occur because students learned valuable skills that employers want.
A file name with an embedded NUL character couldn't be passed to fopen(), or to any other function that takes a pointer to a C-style string. (Not directly relevant here.)
Some of us legitimately believe DSLs are rarely the right choice. We don’t say this to shit on people’s work, we say it to kick off a conversation about API design.

I’ve written DSLs in the past. I was a Rubyist! I have come to some perspective on those choices in the intervening years. I’m a big fan of functions that take arguments, and I am skeptical of hidden shared state.
Guidemaster: Portable SSDs you can buy
Isn't that the point of open offices?
They might be not ancient, but they still didn't manage to produce a good quality parallelized Vulkan renderer. Unreal made something (and marked the whole effort "archived"¹), but it's not really parallelized and performance is bad. I bet Godot will beat them to it, because they are focusing on Vulkan as their primary API.

1. https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux
Sorry you're right. 4K Is run of the mill now. 5K is not quite. But the point still stands, technology improves. It only needs to improve to a certain level before it goes beyond human perception. That will happen in a few years.

Any efforts trying to adapt to the limitations of current technology are wasted.

Here's a 4K display from Phillips for $235
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-276E8VJSB-3840x2160-UltraNarr...

Edit: and a DPI calculator and reference. Notice all the old low-res displays and how most of them are behind us.
https://www.sven.de/dpi/
The "mays" in this statement are doing a lot of work.

There are a few areas of current practice that have this feature: a) the arguments & evidence for it being worse are pretty simple and b) the arguments & evidence for potential benefits are either weak or very convoluted. This is never a good sign.

I think this happens mostly because the reasons these things are being done are for the most part not technical, but the technically oriented people involved don't like to think about that way, and would rather talk about technical solutions - but that is operating at the wrong data.

The business & cost cases behind not doing this "right" in some abstract sense are pretty clear too, though. I wish more people would just be clear about this, and spend less effort obfuscating and more in clearly quantifying the cost of these workarounds.

Any time you hear someone starting off by saying things like "we don't really need good labels", "this synthetic data will be better, actually", "we'll use transfer from X because it's already done most of the work", etc., well what follows is quite likely to be good fertilizer.

Note, I'm not saying these approaches don't have value, just that there is an awful lot of magical thinking going on around it, and a lot of failures due to that.
I have to say that I'm infatuated by 32x32 pixel art icons. There's something about the art style that screams early-2000s. I especially like the ones produced by someone named Masatoshi Ueji. He even drew BeOS icons.

http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/icons/beos_5.gif

https://web.archive.org/web/20070211213920/http://www.venus....

http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/icons11-15.shtml

It's a bit of a shame HiDPI is a thing so people use much higher resolution icons now, but you could just upscale them I guess.
It does happen in the US, and in banks, and not just low-level employees. Palantir sells the service. It has been used by JP Morgan for a few years: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel

In LOTR the Palantir is used by Sauron to corrupt and subdue Saruman by displaying visions of terror. Coincidentally a Palantir employee in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica were instrumental in the Republicans hard lean into fear-based messaging leading into the 2016 Presidential election.
> The administration found Google's policy arguments are "unpersuasive" and argued software code is copyrightable.

What? Wasn't it about APIs not code?
You believe this?—ask any tradesman, mechanic or PE—"Take care of your tools and they will take care of you" is gospel in those fields.

The same, then, should apply to "living tools" if your analogy obtains.
Canada Goose was taken over by Bain Capital in 2013 at a $250m valuation. It later went public in 2016 and is currently worth $3.4b. The ubiquity of these overprices parkas is largely due to their "private equity firm" restructuring.
... assuming everybody plays nice for the common good, ignoring optimizations with externalities.
Yeah, proper power management is not likely to happen in the near future; it's a big task and nobody is working on it, due to ENOTIME.

Wi-Fi may be more reasonable, but we still depend on FreeBSD for that, so we're still behind Linux. What chipset do you have?

What do you mean by "won't boot Haiku at all"? No bootloader? Stuck on splash screen? Kernel panic?
From what I understand, if you took away how dangerous they can be then they dominate the western honeybee in every regard.

I found the line in Wikipedia that makes the claim that "The Africanized bee is considered the bee of choice for beekeeping in Brazil" and the source seems to be a 2009 paper from volume 23 of the journal "Brazilian Journal of Agricultural Research" (Pesquisa Agropecuária Brasileira) which doesn't exist as volume 23 was in 1988 (see http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_issues&pid=0100-2... ).
If you can be notified as soon as thieves are breaking/moving hives, that would help immensely.