skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> how many insanely wealthy private collectors can there be out there, who are willing to risk substantial prison time to own a stolen painting?

Plenty. Think Drug Cartel Bosses. Over half-a-dozen in Mexico, Columbia and Venezuela alone. Nett worth in Billions.
Essentially, yes.

How much work you have to do scales with the number of people you employ. That is, if you keep hiring, people will continue to find more work to do and do it less efficiently.

Five people in a basement could absolutely remake the core functionality of Meetup and scale it to millions of users.

The hundreds or thousands of extra people are chasing long tail revenue, niche features, change for the sake of change, and supporting each other.

Give me a million dollars and a year and I'll have a ready competitor for Meetup.

Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone.

Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.
But I'd have to use Stackoverflow to get my questions on how to do all that answered.
AsmBB v2.8 – better DDoS behavior,XSS prevention and new skin
> it is common for kitchen staff to pool tips at a restaurant

I'm not sure where you got the idea that that is what I was talking about?

Do you not understand what an earnings guarantee means in the context of a tipped job? It means that you have a base pay + tips. If those tips end up not meeting the earnings guarantee, the company will pay you extra to hit that guarantee. That effectively means that the first $x of your tips are going to the company to cover the earnings guarantee. That's what doordash (and most restaurants) are doing.

The US federal minimum wage laws require a minimum wage of $7.25/hour. Tipped employees only require a base rate of $2.13/hour but the employer must guarantee that they earn $7.25/hour w/ tips, if they make less, the employer must pay them the difference. Effectively, the first ~$5/hour of tips goes to the employer.
Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5 years.

Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a primitive virus.

We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first place.

Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we are.
More likely to work early on in the infection, I doubt any anti-viral would be very effective once the patient experiences ARDS.
> cooked up a ridiculous propaganda campaign to demonize a rich philanthropist

A key part of this is preying on and amplifying racism and antisemitism. That Soros is Jewish is essential to the message.

Scapegoating outsiders and minority groups by labeling them as threatening / disloyal has been a long been an effective way for would-be dictators to build/consolidate support among a fearful and cowardly populace.
Shaderbooth: Interactive in-browser editor for making face filters with WebGL
The universe also has 3 spatial dimensions.
Most of the migrants who came to Hungary preferred to go to Germany, as the income taxes in Hungary are the highest inside the EU.

Budapest is an amazing city to live in as long as you don't earn your money there.

The biggest problem for me though weren't his leadership decinsions, but the amount of corruption happening. Hungary lost many places in the Corruption Perceptions Index in the last 10 years, while its surrounding countries got much better.
Appreciate the compliment. :)
It was not done gladly or well, my memorization was of a term only long enough to get me through the tests for that unit. I did not hit perfect scores most of the time but I was a solid A- student (unless the class cared about homework, then I would drop to B/C, but thats besides the point). As a result of this at-the-time convenient ability I gleaned nothing from my schooling career besides how to hack tests, which is a dreadful and personally useless ability to have.
There's two things:

- Medium pops up a "please log in" if you've visited multiple articles in a month, but that's not a paywall, that's just an annoyance. You can dismiss it.

- For a few specific publications, the authors can choose to paywall their content after a few views. OneZero, which is published by Medium themselves, does it. This is from Marker, which also appears to be published by Medium themselves.

Yes, it's confusing for a blog platform to also run publications that accept contributions from outside writers and host those publications on their own blog platform, and have that be different from outside writers just setting up a blog. (I suppose the difference is their own publications have an editor, hopefully they pay contributors, etc.)
When Whatsapp was acquired for 20 billion and was already one of the largest messaging services on the planet it had 50 employees total, 30 of them engineers.

Now granted that's more than five people, but that was a planet sized service. Say you're a company that's worth 10 million or 50 million with a proportionate amount of complexity, you ought to be able to built that with a team of 10 people if you chose your software stack wisely.

Paul Graham has an older piece about Lisp and beating large companies by having a technological edge. Picking your software and understanding architecture can be very important. I have seen Clojure teams of smart engineers in particular in distributed / concurrent systems (the sort of thing that can produce a lot of value) who do as much work in a team of 5 as a big corporate Java behemoth does with a 100 people.
Rich countries try radical economic policies to counter Covid-19
iOS 13.4 release compromises VPN protection
What if a remote employee makes one room available in their home for full monitoring, camera, audio, whatever?

If the employee is not in the room, that's like a break.

Employers monitor cubicles in offices. Would it be worse if the are allowed to monitor one room in the house of a remote employee?

Feel free to discuss. Pros? cons? privacy issues? any other other thoughts, comments.
Meetup is huge. Edge cases and scaling take up massive effort per Pareto's law.
It's interesting how the author argues that eyes can perceive dark-on-light more, but intuitively one would assume that light-on-dark is easier to discern (like bright lights in the night)

Ultimately the best option is probably a progressive change in colors through out the day.
You need way more than 5 people just to handle the customer support and abuse issues when you have that many users.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. There's substantive material to discuss here, but you've unfortunately poured firestarter over it (e.g. snark and flamey rhetoric). When people do this, the results are predictable and dismal—especially when the material is flammable to begin with. That's why the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to post this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In fact, you should do the opposite: add flame retardant, i.e. use neutral language, narrow the scope of your claims to what the substance supports, edit out grand provocation.
I would but I’m not near CA
yeah, that's the one, i wondered about updates
You could also read those articles for another viewpoint:

https://mebfaber.com/2019/08/05/faqs-on-share-buybacks-for-l...
Build Your Own Ethereum Smart Contract Method API
Cats kill much more than mice and are actually a scourge on the environment with the amount of species the kill. Australia has the right idea on culling them.
I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators.

Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results.

On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.
Even if you focus on pure tech problems, startups seems to be failing us in the US.

Other countries have scaled out thermal imaging for fever detection, face tracking for contact tracing, and have mobile apps that can warn people where a previous infected patient have visited before. I have yet to see any of that here.
It's interesting, family meets a distinct need. I've started working with technical peers and it's wonderful to be with others who can stretch your understanding, even just know what you're on about if you talk technically.

Entirely different to the mentoring, caring, parenting, intimate interactions with kids (and my wife).
Authors, Publishers Condemn the 'National Emergency Library' as 'Piracy'
On the other hand, if this comes back next winter, and we would have a mass-producible vaccine ready, then you could say science has saved us from a second pandemic.
As an attendee of many technical meetups, you missed one other problem with group organizers: burnout. In addition to their regular job they are trying to find speakers & space (and sponsors). At some point in their lives, they decide to move on and there is no one else to pickup the torch so the meetup dies.
I would love to use ATS, but it is not a easy language to learn and I find the error messages incredibly cryptic, and the syntax quite weird. Also, it seems to me that is pretty much a research language.

What is the best way to learn it? Could anyone shine some light?
Translations, international money handling, local market research / contacts, SEO, marketing/ads/visibility, ...

I don't think any of those teams will be huge, but I expect it adds up. Just those listed ones are probably 20+ people, so add some management layer as well.
For AWS if you're unfunded (bootstrapped) you can apply directly on https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

In the past I got some via a coworking space, which for some reason counted as accelerator, I think because they had mentors and training sessions. And years later via a startup conference.
It's reasonable to me. Maybe not so reasonable to someone unemployed, diagnosed, and only buying online because they're responsibly self isolating. It's probably the right thing to do in the end, because the business model was never sustainable in the first place, but I would still think hard about how to prevent people from infecting others in an attempt to save money.
cuelang is great for this, I highly recommend spending some time. It's not the easiest to on board yet, jump in slack though and we'll be happy to help.

The project we are building on top of cuelang may be of interest: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
I know what you mean and in ordinary times there's a lot to say for this kind of attitude. But just the raw force of supply and demand applied to this situation is amoral and ultimately feeds the anti-capitalist rhetoric. That's bad since capitalism lifts people out of poverty like nothing else.

There's lots of truly terrible things that could be allowed to happen "naturally" if we just let anyone work under any conditions for any wages. Then we're China or some really terrible place. But one of the main values of the West is exactly we're NOT China and we don't do ruthless things to people and we don't suffer those things to be done by others.

In the end, and make no mistake about it, that's the general neighborhood we're playing in for the moment, a civilization is more than the price of its aluminum or labor or even its stocks. Now is the time when we enact our deepest values.
Undetected cases of Covid-19 could represent around 60% of the total, study says
It was a great website and very usable back in the day. However then you have to have "growth". Which means folks are forced to find every possible way to "monetize" it. You take big money from investors and now investors want even bigger money back. That destroyed the experience and I think community has largely gone. The website could have and should have been run as lifestyle business by small team while exploiting only reasonable growth opportunities that doesn't hurt the community trust as opposed to "go big or go home" mindset.
I dont know if it was because of wework but I interviewed some od rgw top engineering leaders at meetup for replacing leadership roles at a startup I was consulting for. I gained a lot of insights into the engineering org at meetup.

As someone who looks at a "growing" startup up as 30-100 people the "bloat" of the company had me beside myself. Its a site where you search/join/pay to have groups meetup. Why do you need 10 different engineering teams with managers, directors, and VP's?

Conversation points like "I only lead the api for payments" and "how did you launch 5 features in 3 months!!!! Makes me wonder how much bloat, inefficiency, and dead weight exist in such companies.

Disclaimer 1: I get companies in certain spaces requires slower and more careful development practices and policies such has fintech and medtech, i do not consider meetup fitting those criteria.

Disclaimer 2: The startup I consulted for, asside from the founders, executives, and senior management had a great work/life balance so it wasnt like the engineers were doing double time effort, they just focused on being lean and efficient.
I visited a factory here in the UK last year (with some school students), who make plastic injection moulded parts and items. The CEO there said that yes they do manufacture a proportion of their goods in China but the reason that they still manufacture in the UK was that China was a long way away and in fact didn't turn out that much cheaper in the end so there was still money to be made by having a more responsive supply chain with more hands-on quality control. There is a lot of automation in injection moulding though.
Couple of thoughts to your reasoned response.

"The likely result will be substantially reduced payments to care providers as well as significant delays in payment, which then likely causes some providers to stop accepting from these systems, thus overloading other providers who may follow and do the same."

Fed can print money and helicopter it out.

"Everyone needing medical care is reliant on the healthcare system receiving so much money for its services, but given that U.S. healthcare is tied to employment, a lot more people won't be able to pay their bills, so the providers will then increase rates to those who can pay, and employers will be forced to further shed employees to cover premium hikes. Even in the short term, this will reduce new investment in healthcare, such new facilities, equipment, and even equipment maintenance and repair, so the facilities will perform more poorly. Number of beds available will fall because there will be fewer beds per person."

Nationalize the healthcare system and move to single payer.

"There will also be increases in suicide from the increase in unemployment as well as the social isolation

Drug overdoses rise."

It will be interesting to track these numbers over time and compare them to the COVID-19 death toll.
When Facebook brought Instagram for a billion dollars, they only had 13 employees.

Of course, that's the pinnacle of an extremely small and simple feature set, and avoiding anything labour-intensive like moderation, or support, or sales. Indeed, they were iOS-only until 6 days before the acquisition was announced.

I agree you could not take Meetup in its current form and operate it with so few employees.
Why would anyone need a real-time data stream of a site who's sources are usually updated just once a day?
Here’s a bit on that French doctor who started this particular craze: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/didier-raoult-hy...

He doesn’t believe in evolution, nor climate change. At the end of January, he called warnings of a pandemic „crazy“. He has published 3000 papers in the last ten years. And even the photo of him is quite funny if you followed the news in 2016.

Judging by the list of trials, an awful lot of resources is spent on this. I wonder what the opportunity costs are.
Many people who could probably do their job remotely do not do their job remotely.
Carson Block on Short Selling in the Time of Coronavirus
Ask HN: Any online book club for scientific books?
Some books are hard enough that I'd like to be able to discuss them with others, to share ideas, hints for exercices, discuss complex topics etc. Basically a MOOC with a book instead of a teacher.
Technically a web forum would do, with one forum per book, where you would be able to find people who are or have been recently reading that book.
Couldn't find anything like that, surprisingly. Am I blind?
Same in France. I do not usually watch news but now my family insists on doing so, as if there were any surprising news.

Today I refused to switch on the tv and somehow nothing spectacular happened. I hope we are done with this news nonsense.

Radio is a bit better.

All the best for Italy, we were supposed to be in a week on vacation near Genua :(

We are closely watching you and hope your downtrend is real. All the best, ciao!
Almost all remote work is at software companies understandably.

But also often it is for the lower lever, just implement this pre-designed and pre-architected feature roles. Most of the decision making and design will get done face to face at the main office.

This model seems to be the standard but it's also toxic and cruel. Even the most independent person will feel isolated and segregated from their peers and the decisions that others ultimately make.

If you want remote to truly work it has to be the Gitlab model. Everyone is remote, every decision is transparent and all corporate knowledge is captured in a single, collaborative handbook.
> At that price, I'll go to the store myself.

To save $5? Really?

Right now, I'd pay $25/order to actually get a delivery window.
2020 Model Audi Q8, 3.0L Petrol TFSi, Quattro a/T
Love it. Thank you for sharing. Reminds me of some Asimov: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-...

There must be "ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness." which sounds like an environment that would be conducive to basic questions.

He goes on to say "isolation is required" (for having creative ideas) and maybe that's because it is a way for him to avoid the adult-being-and-always-sounding-smart-forcing-function... even as costly as being alone from a team may be!

Feels like some tall shoulders probably agree with you:)
Ask HN: What does a post Covid world look like for hackers?
If you would write a basic scheduler, at some point you'd have to await the userspace code but you wouldn't have any way to force it to stop running. If the userspace code would enter an infinite loop it would hold the kernel thread forever. Within a constrained environment, eg. the kernel itself (and even that's sufficiently complex with loadable drivers that you might end up with bad interactions) I could see some use for async await, but you'd still need to be able to preempt untrusted code.
>Oh, i was sure that i was buying a great reproduction!
omg, that brings back memories!
It's not clear to me from this thread whether those messages only become public if one of the parties to the messages then download the chat, or even when a third party downloads the chat. One seems more serious than the other.
it's fake interest though, just build and release early. Not saying spend months, but beta signups to a non-existent product is false signaling. People do this because they have nothing to give up. It's like VCs not saying no because, who knows, maybe they will pull it off soon and I'll take a look again then.

Get whatever it is in the hands of people, better to talk to strangers in person than to do a beta email list before starting building.
Apple's stance was never as hard line as people make it out to be. While remote is certainly not just there for the asking, there have been remote workers in many lines of work (even hardware engineering) for years (even during Jobs' lifetime).

And Apple by now has offices all over the world, so it's not like "everybody bumps into each other in Cupertino" is a universally feasible model anyway.
I think we also need to be open minded that maybe 'remote work for everyone' is actually less effective. And it will be hard to show evidence otherwise -- this current test case we're going through -- I doubt people are going to say "wow see, look how productive everyone was during the pandemic when they worked from home."
So the rich being selfish fucks. They want to own something and deprive the rest of us of that enjoyment.
Numerical analysis showing SARS-CoV-2 may last more than three days on surfaces
Affordability tests are based off what you’re projected to make and if you have any income or savings at all, that can impact that directly. Moreover, depending on your needs, the cheap plans might not work out. If you’re diabetic and require insulin and testing strips and other stuff, a high-deductible plan probably isn’t going to work out. The same is true if you’ve got specific prescriptions you need covered that are only up to a certain amount on a lower-tier plan or aren’t available unless you pay more. So in some cases, the ACA plan could cost the same as COBRA, and you’d be stuck starting from zero with your deductible, which if you had paid into under your employer, could be significant.

But beyond that, let’s say you anticipate you can make $3000 a month freelancing. Now, this isn’t enough for your rent and your insurance, but it’s still too high, perhaps, to qualify you for a lower-rated ACA plan. And it is certainly too high for Medicaid. So if you live in a high-priced city, you’re now stuck having to decide what you pay for — and that’s not always easy. Remember, it’s not like moving is that easy — you may have to break a lease (which costs money you don’t have), and you’re unemployed so signing a new, less-expensive lease is going to be challenging too.

The safety nets we have in place are really only designed for the very, very poor (and even then, they don’t go far enough). If you are anything but that — you’re really fucked, especially if you live in an medium-size or larger city/urban area.
> If you're bringing in subscription revenue from millions of people you're gonna need some more customer support.

why can my mobile phone provider outsource its support to $random company in $random country but meetup cannot ?
I've been far more productive in the time I've been able to work but the fact that I have a young kid at home isn't helping, exactly as you're describing.
So I end up having a lot less time to get deep into problems.

All in all, only one of my tasks suffered because of this because most of the work I do doesn't require deep thought all that much.
It was a figure of speech. Still my way is valid