skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Do things that don't scale" is about differentiating yourself by throwing people hours at a problem. This is the opposite of what Google does. I'd rather they work on doing support that doesn't scale, as opposed to figuring out how to do a joke that doesn't usually scale

Also that quote was about leveraging being able to do things that don't scale when you only have 100 customers, because that's something large companies like Google can't compete with you on, because by definition they can't do things that don't scale unless it's some skunkswork project
Ask HN: Can we augment ventilator management with remote workers?
Hello HN,

The massive uptick in open source ventilators is very encouraging, but it solves one half of the equation. The other half are the medical professionals who
administer these devices and look after the patients. I've read that there are restrictions on the maximum number of patients per technician, but even if
we put aside public policy and assume that could be changed, there is an upper bound to what one person can safely handle. Further, these brave technicians
are at great risk of developing an infection themselves.

So my question is, is this an industry where we can help improve the situation by developing integrations that allow for remote work of technicians (like a drone pilot).
With the massive numbers in unemployment right now, could we train an army of individuals to help AUGMENT the shortage of technicians to administer these devices from
home? Obviously they cannot replace the technicians entirely as there are skills and functions that cannot be simply taught in the time we have available, further
there are some tasks that cannot be done remotely. However, would this potential group of persons be able to augment the situation greatly enough to take some of the
load off of hospital staff and reduce the risks current technicians face?

If this is possible, I hope this question will inspire folks and companies.

Posted using a throw-away.
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Encouraging C use is at this point, bordering on malpractice. I understand that the author is a leading authority in "secure C coding". While the ABI doesn't have a lot of affordances, we don't have to keep using the language because of the ABI.

Rather

ZetZ -- Symbolic Verifier and Transpiler to C. https://github.com/aep/zz and previous discussions, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22245409

Zig, https://ziglang.org/ https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ziglang

Rust is more of a C++ competitor, https://www.rust-lang.org/

And Dlang has a regime where it can be used w/o a GC. https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html

I left out any language which forces the use of a garbage collector.
Where do these experts come from?

In my case, working for a company that gave me admin access from day one with no practical experience with AWS.

Even though I haven’t done anything stupid (yet) and think I know enough not to now, I wouldn’t recommend that....
LightSail is like DigitalOcean/Linode/Vultr, simple fixed cost VMs and DBs only.
+1. I was gonna write Ishmael too. Definitely one of the best books I've ever read.
I agree completely. It’s also the case that ARM core performance is now close to parity with x86. With a little more time, the arm performance curve will poke out above x86 and it will be the perfect time to adopt arm for desktop.
Exactly. It's a very bad time to get cancer, an organ transplant, a heart problem or trauma needing ICU. The base rate of deaths from those conditions is well known, so in time we'll be able to see which patients died as a side effect of corona (due to being more vulnerable or due to a shortage of medical treatment). Obviously complicated by the lack of road trauma and industrial accidents, and increase in in-home causation due to being off work (and we shouldn't exclude domestic violence, alcoholism, anxiety, suicide, robberies).
It's because the purpose of college is more about signalling than about career training. The things that keep people out are what make it valuable. If you make it more accessible then it loses it's value.
Martin Fowler lists the benefits of microservices as

Strong module boundaries

Independent deployment

Technology diversity

And with a single database you severely limit the benefits from strong module boundaries and independent deployments. Suddenly you have to synchronize deployments, and anyone can pull or change any data in the database which now must be enforced with discipline which gets you into the same boat as a monolith.
I'm amazed these are being spoken of in the same breath. IMO Dune is vastly overrated
Governmental response to corona virus made me really depressed.

If we look at current response of the various governments, it looks like they effectively decided to increase the already high level of income inequality even further.

It seems system is unwilling to revise itself at all, which will keep making various socioeconomic issues worse in the long run.

I guess one good thing is that current system keeps getting less and less stable with each crisis, so sooner or later it will collapse for real, once that happens I hope humans will be able to come together and build something better.
John Fowles, French Lieutenants Women, really gets the details of how society has changed from the 19th century to the twentieth century.

I would recommend 19the century great novels, that really was a golden age of literature, so many great works came out in the period near the mid of the century.

Also George Eliot, in the current context, would recommend her novel Romola, set in Florence, perhaps the finest treatment of Savanarola in the whole of fiction.
I think any sufficiently complex system is hostile to reform just through its natural inertia, which in a huge system is a complex and fascinating topic itself.

But when you have truly enormous amounts of money and power at stake and a system that has settled into a certain posture that has concentrated those resources into certain hands...of course it would be very hostile to any change.

As the article states it takes shocks to bring about significant changes and hopefully we can move things forward some as a result of the current situation.
It doesn’t help now (at least not live, but you can watch highlights) but there are some webcams at Brooks Falls in Katmai, where bears famously congregate each summer to fish the salmon run. I watched quite a few good shots last June/July. Probably plenty of other webcams on that site I have yet to check out.

https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brooks-falls-brown-...
You really can't compare across areas. I can get 20 mbps DSL for $50 here. At my old place, eight miles away, I could get 1000 mbps for $90. At my parents' lake cabin in Tennessee they can get 3 mbps for $50. And?
Lancet [1] seems like it fixes at least some of the unpredictability. (Haven't used it though, only read about it on another site.)

[1]: https://github.com/TiarkRompf/lancet
Ok, so when u make an unsuccessful game youre not solving problems?
> 2) landlords will have to lower rent to account for periodic lost income over the next 2 years

What does than mean?
The median, not the average. But it does seem to be saying 50% of small businesses make less than $7/day. Maybe this is after paying the owner a salary?
> Do we hold so low standards of people? Are we so much better than everyone else? What’s wrong with fun?

Look at top voted answers in this and decide for yourself ;)
We only identified two things that were unusual. For one, he used RHEL instances instead of Cent or Ubuntu and the other was he allocated a load of EBS capacity with provisioned iops. Idk if it's even possible to a complete history like if he had done other stuff that he had already undone before we looked.
Included are payroll, so yes, the majority of outflow is employing people.
Potential energy has mass? Is that true? It means a rock at the top of a mountain has more mass than it does at the bottom of the mountain. And a stretched rubber band has more mass than a relaxed rubber band. It’s been a looong time but I don’t recall learning this in physics.
The article does not support your take on this.

Covidien — a publicly traded company with sales of $12 billion that year — already sold traditional ventilators, but that was only a small part of its multifaceted businesses. In 2012 alone, Covidien bought five other medical device companies, in addition to Newport.

Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.

Industry consolidation stifled an innovation that could have prevented the current ventilator shortage. Despite the federal government's best efforts.
I mean if it's just about performance, why switch architectures instead of using AMD chips?
USPS delivers packages much faster, more efficiently (fewer stops), significantly more cheaply, and with better employee pay and benefits. Medicare negotiates far more effectively than private insurance (although obviously that isn't a simple comparison) and has dramatically lower overheads. Government and even locally-owned infrastructure is cheaper than commercial infrastructure like roads or communications. Government-owned health services are cheaper and higher quality. Government engineering projects are superior. The GAO and IRS are extremely effective financial institutions.

> But when there’s a problem not well suited for competition to solve efficiently, that doesn’t guarantee a good government result: there’s a ton of variability in the quality of government responses.

Can you find me an example? By and large, the idea that the government is inefficient is a myth. There are boondoggles like Star Wars, but those are failures independent of government implementation. There are "failures" like Amtrak that are unprofitable, but they are kept running to offer services at a given price point because we want that regardless of what the market says.

Government projects are generally subject to the exact same motivations as private projects. They make profits. Employees can be fired and promoted. Innovation is rewarded, at the individual level. Underperforming projects are cut, often much more aggressively than in the free market.

Much more important than a sense of patriotism is the fact that governments are subject to intense internal and external scrutiny. Literally the most powerful people in the country are constantly looking, specifically to cut individual programs. There is no safe position in the government and institutional rot is constantly being gutted even when it's unwise, eg CDC, EPA, IRS lately. You will not find that pressure at IBM.
We Should Regulate Ridesharing Like Buses and Restaurants
It's an oil cooler :)
I haven't found it that hard. What tools do you use?
Yes, after paying salaries, owner distributions, etc. There isn’t much incentive for small businesses in the US to keep excess cash in the company.
Actually, the first rule of kidnapping is to get the victim out alive.

Sometimes, the best option for that is to pay the ransom.
Boringest game ever!
> in fact, it’s par for the course.

I would be very surprised if any significant fraction of CEOs and business owners had cut their personal compensation to this degree. Sure there are a few here and than, but probably, what, less than 5%?

This guy is clearly trying to garner some promotion out of his sacrifice, but he did still make the sacrifice and I think it benefits our society to laud people who do this.
I think Chomsky is talking about capitalists, not corporations.
>But who isn't solving problems?

Unskilled labor. Unskilled labor is there to execute a solution. Programmers (and others) are expected to innovate. Its important to remember that instead of simply cranking out code for the facet of the problem that happens to be immediately in front of you.
As far as I have heard, when they enter a market, they pay the driver more than they're getting from the user.

Plus marketing. You think Google let Uber put an advert on every Google Maps search for free?

There's actually a whole article about it on crunchbase:
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-mo...
Let me illustrate with an example. A colleague operates a company doing about $10M in annual revenue. Due to stay at home orders, his business has completely failed. A very wealthy minority shareholder who lent the company some funding last year is now going to do a debtor-in-possession financing and will end up owning the whole thing. The founder, who is not wealthy, will lose everything. The rich man will gain everything.

Once the pandemic is over, the company will return to normal. The rich just got richer, folks.
From a favorite HN comment:

When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253

I'm guessing something like the dynamic described here was involved.

The silver lining here may be that he outed himself (literally) before he was able to build an empire of such incompetence.
The World of Null-A: A. E. van Vogt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A
It is a series, but Killer of Men by Christian Cameron. Just helped me understand a lot of things about myself and how I grew over the last 20+ years.
SO doesn't run on a single machine, they have a very detailed blog post around their architecture.
At least 8 strains of the coronavirus are spreading across the globe
Why do you need a script? With CloudFormation (and I assume terraform), you create a file containing all of your resources in a “stack” and you delete the stack when you’re done.
ZipRecruiter Slashes Staff by 39%
By Irvin Yalom. Great if you also want to learn bit of philosophy:

- When Nietzsche Wept

- The Schopenhauer Cure

- The Spinoza Problem
Pretty simple. Make sure I am calling people everyday either on the phone or video calls. Talking to the neighbours at a distance always helps.
The thing is that it's not really complicated anymore. It may be my area of expertise, but just following basic step-by-step instructions, it took me about 10 minutes to have a full ad-blocking, Wireguard VPN server on a DigitalOcean droplet by using Algo: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo , including the setup for my phone and iPad.
Red Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson

These books gave me a very hopeful outlook for humanity's future.
Does my product suck? Or is it me?
As I see, it means small businesses are getting squeezed too, just like poorer individuals who also have small cash buffers. It's possible to interpret this as economic efficiency, but it is efficient in the same way communism is efficient, i.e. efficient at misallocating resources. Tight budgets are like tight rubber bands and if there's enough stress something will break. I think that's enough terrible analogies, you get the point.
They are, there are plenty of recent news articles about this. Trump has generally been very slow to bring the full force of the federal government to bear on this crisis, but he is acting, as are the states.
Ask HN: How did they manage to screw that up so badly?
Share stories where you, your team, someone else's team, or business royally borked it. Maybe its a good idea gone bad or a bad idea taken way to far.
"Extend your intuition to imagine that you have perfect competition where there are infinitely many identical goods all competing to the lowest price either no differentiation, and people will price at zero profit. "

But this is not reality.
I doubt doing abstractions like these are helpful in understanding anything, when the base is so far off.
> It is a loophole to me.

It's not a loophole, it was the publicly stated purpose of the law when it was proposes.
I think you’re describing the currently-terribly-unfashionable-but-still-vital role of architect.
The setup survived 2x HN front page surges recently so I was curious what the limits of such a small VM would be!
If true, doesn't this obviously indicate widespread cheating on reported revenues? Maybe the problem here though is using the median as if it were meaningful.

Another explanation is that a large percentage of business lose money and they drag the median down.

Or it may just be that outflow here include salary or dividends to the owner. In which case there's nothing surprising about it.
This could be said of masters degrees as well though.
Which cloud or physical server hosting providers provide either user configurable hard spending limits or the option to (only) pre-pay? The big 3 cloud providers obviously don't, and neither does DO, I believe (you can pre-pay but not as your only payment option).

For personal hobby projects taking your chances on customer support goodwill in case you rack up a bill that would bankrupt you due to a wrong click seems kind of insane.

So what are good alternatives?
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

It makes you feel like you have an innate duty to do productive work.
Taken as a unit or class of businesses that's true. But the individual picture... I think JPM has taken the median of outflows, and the median of inflows - not the median of margins.

I can't say from the report, but I wonder if business margins are partitioned into (a.) positive and above $7/day, and (b.) negative margins (for those businesses heading into the 9-12% of business exits per year).

On the other hand, the report also says that inflows and outflows are highly correlated, so the variance in margins away from $7/day must not be too high.
Dune was my favorite series until TBP. Dune degrades quickly after the first book while I thought each TBP was better than the last.
Incorrect. It is mathematically satisfying, but inefficient. The best way to hold a pizza slice is with another one on top, sandwiching the topping, so you get a double thickness with the base on the outside so you don't get tomato on your hands.
That's not unit cost. Companies spend money on advertising when they're new because it pays dividends for decades. It's not inherently loss-making, it's just investment that hasn't returned its full yield yet.
I read it as the money left over after everyone, including the owner(s), has been paid. $7/day is the net new wealth generated by the business, so to speak.
That spending is exactly why it is difficult to change. Every dollar spent is a dollar someone else earns.
Technically correct, the best kind of correct!

Conda can in fact install pypy from conda-forge, which is close enough for most people.
I’d love to read your results rendering something in Blender on the latest A13 chip, if that’s the best way to make a comparison.
Neal Stephenson's Anathem I found mind-expanding.
Scopes Compiler Infrastructure: the convenience of Python with the perf of C
How to find everything you need on the Deep Web and the Dark Web
I think it rather says that the more you leverage, the more risk you take, the less you can survive hard times.

Same story with the Private Equity Funds industry.
Short answer: yes

Longer answer: it doesn't matter as much as you'd think. These companies making huge layoffs are facing an existential crisis, not slimming down for a revenue shortfall.
A large part of that spat is that Russia still thinks it can drive out the US shale producers whereas Saudi Arabia is done fighting for now. Moscow has a $150 billion warchest whereas Riyadh is bleeding money and risking the biggest IPO in history.
There is no such a thing xyz went bankrupt because of cloud over provisioning. First of all we don't have the whole story from OP and I suspect he's not telling everything, second AWS will cover those accidents, third by default you can't create many resources on an account with default quota.
Yup, just like going to the zoo in person. The first link I tried was the San Diego Zoo's Panda Cam, and all I saw was an image empty any pandas.
I'm excited to give this a shot, but I've heard this promise many times before.
You know every single year (well maybe not the first one where everyone thought GMail was a prank 2004-04-01) I complained and moaned to everyone within earshot. (That's a significant stretch)

However with the world going 'down to hell in a handbasket' I think I'll miss it. What I mean, I'll miss complaining how pathetic all these corporation are to everyone. ;)
Using promo code GIFT gets you 1 month free but you have to sign up for CBS all access to get it. Best before 4/23 is what I think the ad said.
I doubt that Apple will completely lock down MacOS. However, for corporate machines, the presence of Apple-controlled hardware will enable more comprehensive control of the endpoint, which is arguably good for security.
It's kind of surprising because personal finance experts are forever lecturing individuals to have 6-12 months of cash on hand as an emergency fund. Maybe different rules apply to a business because it can always just declare bankruptcy and restructure?
Most of the NPP radionuclide discharge is in the form of highly mobile tritium and noble gas fission products. Since these radionuclides do not accumulate biologically, they rapidly dilute to levels that translate into very low human exposure.

Most of the discharge from coal plants modeled in "Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants" was from traces of radium discharged from the smoke stack along with other combustion products. Since radium behaves chemically like calcium, and is taken up into plants and the bones of people who eat those plants, it can have a much greater effect on human radiation exposure even though the coal plant discharging fewer curies of radioactive material to the environment.

A modern do-over of the 1978 study would need to take into account a few things:

- Smokestack emissions of radionuclides from coal have been incidentally reduced by other anti-pollution measures required on coal power plants in the US. Ash precipitators, SO2 scrubbing, and mercury scrubbing will all cut down somewhat on radium escaping via the smokestack. (None of this helps with coal's CO2 profile, but it does reduce other pollution hazards.)

- Operational changes have reduced how much effluent nuclear power plants discharge into the environment -- even if the plant was already built in the 1970s. It should use more recent effluent numbers like those in "Radioactive Effluents From Nuclear Power Plants: Annual Report 2008" rather than 1970s NPP effluent numbers.

- Locality of food production/consumption has decreased since 1978. The original study assumed that people ate food grown in the same region they live in, so that radioactive effluents from power plants affected local populations via the agricultural food chain. It will change if people living near a power plant in Maryland are eating foods mostly produced out-of-state.