skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every time I see an HN analysis of the stock market, I hesitate to click it. It's only one-degree better than bitcoin spam memes on reddit.

For example, the above paragraph is completely hollow until it gives some numbers. What % of the stock is held by boomers retirement funds? (is it 1% of the market volume? 10%?)

A half-analysis is no better than no analysis.
who ever is talking with customers should be working out the product features. I would argue there needs to be agreement about all major decisions, though. agree to agree. if you can't agree go with what that customer says and go from there. and/or test your assumptions.
Either they are A/B testing something new on you or you misunderstand what people mean by doing it in Firefox. They mean without any native client or browser extension being installed.

I haven't tried it this week, but that was the first thing I encountered when my university switched us to Zoom. I could join by browser in Firefox and see screenshare and video, but I would have had to also dial in to hear audio via phone. In chromium, I could get audio and video together. But, it is a more limited interface than the native client in terms of seeing attendee information. This week, I also tried chromium and saw severe audio quality issues. Joining the same meeting with the native client worked much better.

I understand that our university is consolidating and it apparently works for large lectures etc. For my own use, with small technical groups, we were happy with bluejeans before. It worked by Firefox using just webrtc functionality, AFAIK. What I've read is that Zoom is doing their own streaming and codecs, not using browser webrtc functions.

As an aside, I also encountered sudden SSO login problems in Zoom this week on Fedora. They seem to be defaulting to an embedded qt5-webengine browser and this was not working right at all. Editing their config zoomus.conf file to turn off the embedded SSO browser was the only way I could get logged in again.
At least in the US the main reason is the public hysteria that would be brought on by the mass cultural shift. The reality is most households in the US do not have masks. There would be similar chaos that the US has seen with toilet paper but on a more dire scale because they DO actually help and, unlike toilet paper, when they are gone they WON'T be replenished in a timely manner because there is a shortage of retail masks.

It's propaganda. It is reasonable propaganda as having to have actual PSAs on how to sew your own masks or make them out of materials at home would really start ramping up the general anxiety.
In the end, it's a crap shoot... Even their highest marker of validity is only about 50%.

In the end, if you make it too hard in an employee market, you will have good to great candidates drop off... if you make it too easy, you will wind up at the bottom of the barrel. Market pay will also vary wildly and dramatically, and perception is equally varied.

Where I work now, we have a small pre-interview code challenge... it's not particularly difficult and in general should be resolvable in under an hour. I've seen questions on the other side, that I've literally spent 3+ hours on something that said an hour. I suggest those coming up with these things actually implement their challenge on a clean computer (only tools, no reference code) and time themselves. I now cut myself off at an hour and submit what I have stating as much.

As to structured interviews, it will depend. It bugs me both ways when I see more generic, low level pattern questions in interviews only because the practical implications are usually very limited. On the interviewer side, it does help to ask some of the more quiz-like questions as it tends to give you a decent baseline of what the person being interviewed understands.

In the end, personal questions along the lines of what a person works on (developers) outside of educational or work settings gives a ton of information on how they work as well as what they know.

Culture, for as much of a B.S. thing that it is, is actually very important as well. A functional team or set of teams needs a few different types of personalities and worker types in order to do things well as a team. Being able to get along together is also imperitive.

In the end.. it's a crap-shoot and understanding the needs, fill and fit are all varied a bit... trying to normalize doesn't help much. Also, business needs and talent pools will vary greatly.
There was an HN submission about https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ at some point, which is a great visualization of just how far this is, and how amazingly deep some forms of life can get.
> I truly have no idea what will be left behind for me and my peers, when all of this is said and done.

I'm in the same boat, as a new grad about to enter the labour market with a computer engineering degree.

While the situation may seem impossible, once this is all said and done we will still have each other - with everyone the wiser having witnessed the collapse of our current ridiculous system. We're two weeks into isolation and layoffs where I live, and I'm already seeing lots of graffiti and posters about rent strikes.

One day the boomers will die, penniless because their wealth only exists in an overly-engineered financial system, and the young will be left to rebuild a more intelligent and caring society.
I pay for Google ads to generate leads for my business. We've seen a drop in conversion rate, but we're still generating leads which we really need right now to continue to operate.

The problem is that the cost per lead just went up dramatically. These ad credits will solve that problem for us and allow us to continue to generate leads. This is exactly the kind of help my business needs right now.
Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Are a Public Health Hazard
When I have to explain HN to normal people I say, "Culturally it's a wasteland, but the technical information you can glean there is top notch."

What I mean by "cultural wasteland" is that you have a lot of social retards and moral cretins on here who, for whatever reasons, will gladly lumber threads with crazy sociopathic BS. You have to wade through and weed out a lot of arrogant unsympathetic bastards (like me.)

On the other hand, awesome people show up all the time like, "Oh yeah, I did that, AMA." I once interacted with Alan Kay on here! Carl Hewitt is on here regularly (trying to get people to finally pay attention to Actor model.) Walter Bright (D lang) is here. Charlie Stross replied to a comment I made in re: O'Neill colonies the other day. I could go on and on. (And those are just (relatively) famous people. There are all kinds of brilliant not-quite-so-famous people on here too. I'm just name dropping to make m'point.)

So that's nice.

- - - -

Another thing about HN is that it's not a community. It's more like a bar at a train station. Most people are just passing through and the regulars it does have should probably do something better with their lives.

Like me. I'm pretty much a recluse these days, and this HN account "carapace" is damn near the only outlet I have to communicate with the outside world. I'm on here pretty much every day (for better or worse) wasting time I could be spending on important projects (like my Joy interpreter. Heh.)

Imgur is more of a community than HN: those folks send each other pizzas! I'm seriously, there's a whole pizza club that just sends pizzas to imgurians who are broke and hungry. HN doesn't do that.

- - - -

To the extent that HN is a health community it's all about dang and sctb. Those two do an incredible job and I have nothing but respect for them. Ask them about HN's community health.

- - - -

Last but not least, IMO the way to judge the health of an online community (or any community) is to ask, "Has it made me a better person?"

FWIW, I think that participation on HN has, over the last few years, made me a little bit of a better person. I'm less knee-jerk sardonic, more willing to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. And I've learned to value good faith conversation over witty barbs and sarcasm. (Although I do still consider a good rant to be a kind of art, like slam poetry.)
>Google thinks Ads are the solution?

No, they see their Ad sales declining, so they are trying to stimulate their own business with this act. "Grants" to new customers so they hopefully become buying customers in the future; loans (nothing like becoming a lender in this economy); and of course grants/loans will just bid up ad prices on existing customers. Not to mention all the major business just highjacked $5.75T from the taxpayers so they will have nothing better to do than waste that on ad buys.
I don't see how this addresses the comment you're replying to.

The last month of cliff-fall would suggest your premise is wrong: prices absolutely can go down.
Finding the nearest locations around you using AWS Amplify
OK fair, I misremembered exactly what happened.

I'm still not convinced a contact tracing app would be legal though, given that it could lead people to seek medical attention who might not otherwise need or benefit from it. Didn't Apple talk about how they needed to work with the FDA to get their ECG functionality approved?
Am I missing something? How does this handle different package types for the same OS/Arch? Like, if I wanted to host a .deb, .rpm, *.appimage, etc?
Most of the land you could do that with is agriculturally unproductive. Which is why it's federal land to begin with. Some of it is natural parks, and I don't want to see that turned to agriculture. I really don't think it's that simple at all.
This is NOT funding:

- $250 million in ad grants ...

- $340 million in Google Ads credits ...

- A pool of $20 million in Google Cloud credits ...

A company that has a Bazillion $ in the bank, has means to really make a difference. This is not.

Edit/Clarification:

The original title was: "$800M funding and grants to support ..". Now they changed it.

I take issue with the claim of providing funding, and all they offer is free ADs. I appreciate that Google is doing _something_. I don't think they have to. I don't think that free ADs is a thing that people need right now.
The grants are for existing customers, not new customers.
The unhealthy part in both cases is the inability of erstwhile professional adults to have a civil and productive conversation about things that matter, and like as not, politics does matter. It matters a lot more than many of the topics that get discussed here, despite being sorted into the "mainstream, therefore off topic" bucket by most.

It's particularly unhealthy in HN's case because this community has the pretense of holding itself to a standard of intellectual merit and civility above the internet mainstream. We can have intellectually stimulating discussions about compiler design or type theory all day long but wander outside the "technical" box and suddenly people are screaming about white genocide and cultural marxism or spouting QAnon or anti-vaxx conspiracy theories.
Still doesn't work for all cases. At my work we had a system running a control loop reboot due to updates, which reset a system which had been stabilising for weeks (we had tried to stop it updating, unsuccessfully as it turned out). Windows is basically rendering itself unsuitable for running such a system because of their update policy (which is a shame when the systems necessary for running the control loop depend on it).
It’s not the “corporations” as this abstract entity that are focusing on shareholder value as a top priority.

It’s the C Suite members, and it’s the board members... it’s a small group of people at the top who are trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the company and at the expense of the people who actually run the company.
>This is a choice Google is making on how it wants to conduct charity.

Maybe they should choose not to maximize tax avoidance instead.
It's a good argument for why companies shouldn't monomaniacally focus on profit, but in practice they don't really seem to do that in the first place. (In fact, one of the prevailing concerns about the recent stock market has been that it focused too little on profit, with many large tech companies trading at extreme multiples of their earnings based on stories about how cool and important they are.)
Do people not expect the market to go down when business revenues have been forced lower due to unforeseen circumstances? The fact is a valuation made in November 2019 had no way of taking this into account.

This isn't to say whether or not it's a bubble, but I am surprised at the number of people who think that stock prices going down is due to financial health of companies rather than people attempting to sell stocks either in a panick or because they suddenly need the liquid cash on hand (due to job loss) and are thus willing to sell at a loss.

And regardless of their merits or demerits, share buybacks do increase actual earnings per share, which is one method to valuate shares. It's like, if there are four partners in a partnership and two decide to buy out the other's shares, their shares are now worth twice as much, assuming the corporation continues making revenue.

Then I hear about corporate debt and how that forces layoffs. The fact is companies are not going to retain employees when they cannot conduct business, regardless of cash on hand. It's not even a moral concern. Companies can simply layoff their employees and have them receive unemployment insurance. Even if they wanted to be 'ethical' and provide health insurance, the cost of a severance package with 18 months of health insurance is less than paying them and providing health insurance. From a corporation's perspective, irrespective of how much cash or debt they have, layoffs are simply superior.
Blog spam that is effectively just a gish gallop of weak points that are each contentious on their own and it uses citations of Seeking Alpha which is about as good as a citation of Medium.com.
Grants are only going to customers with an active account in the previous year. So this does not drive new customers to the platform. If anything, it makes adwords less attractive, because new customers without grants would be competing against old customers with grants.
Money you think you have in your bank are actually just a promise recorded in a database. Even if that promise is fulfilled and you get cash on your hands, it can be diluted into worthlessness by printing trillions more. All of that is controlled by few guys behind closed doors.

None of that applies to Bitcoin. Is that good enough example from real life?
> They essentially are the government as they have a larger impact on your daily life than the actual government!

Amazon and Wal Mart could disappear overnight and I would just shop elsewhere. Amazon isn't in charge of my water quality or road maintenance.
I like HN because it is a place where technology and business are taken equally seriously. I think of the > programming subreddit which is overrun by communists who think that if money has any effect on your motivation as a programmer you're like a pedophile or something

Theres a level of irony in trying to claim some sort of level of superior intelligence and then following it up with a paragraph of nonsense demonstrating you know little about the community you've attacked and the ideology you've attempted to label it with.
I'm wondering if this is an older article. I definitely ran into that problem in the past but now things are fairly standardized across different desktop environments. But I do agree it would be nice to have a centralized repository for documentation similar to MSDN.
Why does a company with a Bazillion dollars in the bank need to be a charity? If we agree that's the case, we should tax companies more. If not, what's the problem?
just ban bloomberg.com cookies in site settings
That’s tricky without building a phone yourself from opensource hardware and software.

At least with Apple, they’re under so much scrutiny you can be fairly confident that if their software was lying it would quickly appear in the news.

Finally the above clearly shows that your assertion you can’t turn off the WiFi or Bluetooth radios is false (assuming the software isn’t outright lying, if think that then you should have said so in your first comment).
We've also been using team.video - its a new free video conferencing tool for remote teams that has a built in collaborative doc feature.
German Ventilator Manufacturer: “Absolutely Mission Impossible”
Doesn't matter. If they made the professional judgement call he needed more than they could offer, someone should have been calling 911 in order to get a meat wagon on the way. If he was bad enough gone to have to head to an ER, th he Urgent Care should have at a minimum hit him with prednisone and a nebulizer treatment to get his airways open. Most also have Epi-Pens on site if they were really worried about his chances of making it to the hospital alive.

You don't get to cherry-pick patients because it's inconvenient. Shit happens, and you're the Doc/NP. Get out the prescription pad, write a scrip or call in to the nearest pharmacy to expedite, and have office staff or whoever drove him in pick it up.

Welcome to professional culpability. Now if what they said was, we won't see you because you can't pay; go to the ER, some naming and shaming is in order.
Old English is not similar enough to English for English speakers to understand, so this isn't particularly helpful.

https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/orosius.html

https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/chron.html
This should be a default in Eloquent. I cannot tell you how many hidden performance issues we've encountered due to its magic methods.
Money returned to shareholders is the "one true number," even moreso than profit. Retained earnings are only valuable insofar as investors expect them to be returned in the future -- a company that pays no dividends, buys back no shares, cannot be bought out, intends to operate until it goes insolvent, and cannot have a new board brought in to change these policies is "worthless" as an investment vehicle.

So in principle there's nothing wrong with the buybacks. However, investors can have the mistaken impression that these buybacks would continue into the future, and predictions of the future -- and thus the fair stock price -- can change in a heartbeat.
I, for one, would love to volunteer my health information from my Watch to help - if it’s possible that it would help in any way.
Looks great. Does it have multilingual support?

A few remarks:

- It would be nice to have a button to collapse replies for a given comment, but not the comment itself.

- On mobile (andoid), it is bit laggy.

Thank you for open-sourcing.
Haha, ISTR something on HN within the last year about "peak sand"[0]. All physical substances are vulnerable to this silliness: we're nowhere near "peak peak".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20363875
Using them on separate pages is fine, but using React and jQuery on the same page is usually not a good idea since React needs to “own” its slice of the DOM and changing things in there with jQuery could cause weird bugs.

But anyway, it’s impossible to tell from just the package.json file whether React and jQuery are being used on the same page, or just both used in different parts of the app.
If Google wants to help small businesses, they should start by stopping their practice of defrauding it's Adsense publishers.

$30k MRR gone overnight alongside $40k already earned in Adsense income siezed by Google. All this happened early this month of March, effectively crippling our ability to take care of employees and survive the Covid-19 crisis.

Such hypocrisy.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You can only get sick and die once, but that lasts forever too.
> or browser extension being installed.
Did you just mention this as an example, or is there a browser extension that makes Zoom work in Firefox?

I think I'd prefer an extension to installing their client.
> The point of contact tracing is to find out who to quarantine, so you don’t have to lock down the entire population.

But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.

> It’s why most of them don’t get to this point.

But we are at this point already.
Those are not the sole two options one has available when called a derogatory name. A fun third option is to completely ignore it and demonstrate in that ignorance that you've already won the conversation, which breaks the negative reinforcement you're discussing.

Seriously, next time someone goes after you, try it. Laugh and move on. It's really, really fun to watch what people do in response, because their anger at not landing the desired effect often manifests in physical twitches. Don't give people what they want until it benefits you.
And it's a pretty annoying regression.
I'd argue this is more of an issue with wayland than zoom. Wayland seems to break many things from what I've read.

I use linuxmint, so largely, I don't run into these issues.
You could make the animation slow down exponentially, to make the growth look linear. Basically turn it into a log plot. Misleading if you don't know what you're looking at though.
There’s something called the advertisers dilemma (akin to the prisoners dilemma) for a reason- game theory suggests advertising has become de facto necessary only because other parties do it. In other words, small businesses would choose NOT to advertise if they all cooperated and chose not to.

And I owned a restaurant. Restaurants, by and large, do not advertise on Google Search. If they do, it’s a small fraction of their ad spend. There are many ways to get the message across, like actually being good and having a connection with recurring customers.
Czechia got some quick tests from China. Their reliability was about 60% compared to lab, false positives and false negatives.

I think DNA and RNA research is severely lacking in most countries. In a few years we will look at this year as 1960ies of computer engineering.

Edit: source
https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/ostrava-rychlotesty-kor...
Any accountants here?

Isn't this just an accounting trick? They're going to lose revenue. But can't they now issue this "grant", and then pretend they aren't losing revenue -- they're just issuing a grant?

Or is that not how it works? I don't know, but would like to know.
One use of financial engineering is to distill risk into very narrow products that allow innovative instruments to be created.

The problem is that systemic risk is then distilled out of the priced instruments that are created, yet those instruments are significantly more vulnerable to systemic risk than simple equities, etc.
>The House just passed a two trillion dollar relief bill.

My understanding is it is $6T, with $4T going to the Fed so the bankers can make money with it...
Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
I'm the owner of small construction business and I need to get access to an old gmail for recovery purposes that Google has suspended for nonpayment.

I can't get a hold of anyone at the same time that my email is more important than ever. Google suggests to "contact their support, may take 7 days" even after I successfully entered the phone 2FA and a recovery email code.

Every day I'm locked out things get worse.

Does anyone have any tips for contacting Google, maybe talking to a human being?

Thank you HN
My view is that `foo?` is a nice sugar for the common Option/Maybe/null case, but that a language is severely missing out if it doesn't also offer general sum types. I don't understand why more languages don't offer them, it seems like it'd be a fairly easy feature to add without breaking backwards compatibility.
Indeed. That's been pretty common industry-wide for online collaboration and conferencing tools.