skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say HN is fairly healthy. As others have pointed out, it's relative, but HN is definitely healthier than, say, Slashdot, or many Reddit subs. That said, there are subs on Reddit that I consider healthy, but that's a separate issue.

What makes a forum "healthy" to me? I'd say a few things
stand out to me (this list is not comprehensive, mind you).

1. The question "do I learn something from interacting here?" In the case of HN the answer is very often "yes". Now, by "learning" I don't mean "mastering" anything. I just mean "I learned about some person, topic, resource, book, article, field, etc., in a way that deserves further exploration and may be of benefit to me." That happens quite often here, both from the submitted links and the ensuing discussion.

2. Do I take away anything actionable? Again, quite often yes. The action may be "bought this book based on a recommendation", or "downloaded this new framework to start experimenting with it", or whatever, but I definitely find actionable, valuable information here.

3. Is there an absence of most racist / misogynistic / jingoistic / xenophobic / bigoted rhetoric, conspiracy theories, complete snake oil, etc? Mostly I find the answer to be "yes". You will see accusations of misogyny here from time to time in certain threads, and you may see little flare ups of nationalistic sentiment or whatever ever now and then, but on balance I find HN to be pretty good in that regard.
There is one crucial feature missing. There should be an option for “multiple” other locations. Since we are all practicing social distancing, I have scheduled a call with 5-10 of my friends over the weekend and they are spread over 5 different time zones and countries. We ultimately found one time that works for all of us using iOS world clock.
My bad, the website works. I absolutely get a prompt on the app store to sign in, and a prompt to update to ios 13.1 (which is not available to download, presumably because iphone6)
Sure, but unless we have some reason to think that this will have some reason to concentrate in the lungs in particular its a quick sanity check. Maybe it does concentrate in the lungs and this'll be a great medicine but a priori we don't have any reason to expect that and this is a reason not to get our hopes up.
This. Often, I look up links-that-I-find-elsewhere here to read comments. If I couldn't find it, and it sounds worth it, I post it.
Do demogagoues who do activism for ad money and to sell merch to their dumb fans count?
You have to factor in expected growth, divvied amongst fewer shares.
Yes... He says equal risk of covid here or Chicago (where'd I go stay with family), NYC definitely has more resources, and it's moving west.
It is a trap. Traps are especially effective and harmful in panic mode when everyone catches the first bait. In the long run, free software (not as in beer) is much better for everyone. Especially in panic it is essentiel to think thoroughly through your decisions.
I think productivity is much higher at least with NodeJS, but for large projects I would do in Postgre/MySQL.
> It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN)

I'm intrigued by the implication that HN is not social media.
It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
Remember this joke?

‘A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies. ‘The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: “Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away.”’

If the ruling class plays it right the working class will go after each other instead of the ruling class. And so far they seem to do really well.
Slack video calls don’t work for 10
ppl or more.

webex quality is very bad for 35+ active participants.

Teams etc. have very bad quality during this crisis induced load.

lots of the solutions currently are barely working (google with only bad quality, others don’t have working phone call in etc.

Zoom just keeps working, for everyone.

to put this into perspective: that’s mostly for uses cases beyond 3ppl or 2+ countries, so i’d guess 90% of the users of all tools are unaffected.
I've always found discussions to have a variety of perspectives which is cool. I just wonder if the community is mostly men.
I appreciate Google's efforts, but it's really depressing to realize how terrible we have it in the Third World and how hard or how little of these funds will trickle down to the people and orgs on the fore fronts.

If I was in the US now, my company and staff would qualify for a large number of help avenues, not to even speak of grants for our work on COVID 19. Over here? The AWS bill we pay monthly has doubled...because our currency has fallen that much. I won't meet payroll on Monday because clients have paused their work and payments to us...etc

Meanwhile here is all manner of funds seemingly available but just another new extra requirement out of reach.

As usual, the beneficiaries will be larger orgs and their army of consultants and friends.
> You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever

With an app like tracetogether, you can just uninstall it after the pandemic, right? No need to surrender your rights forever.
Office hours usually end up 1 on 1 too.
If we assume that corporate value is relatively unchanged from 2014 and then assume that the government bails out the companies by paying off the debt, then the stock market's growth from 2014 would be a form of inflation, wouldn't it?
> If a company like amazon generates very little corporate profit, is that unproductive growth?

Of course not. There would be more employees, more taxes paid, more buildings being built, more assets, etc. thus more money going into the economy.

I've always dreamed that companies should run with zero profit (like the outdoor store co-ops like REI or MEC in Canada). They could price their products so they don't make any "extra" money each year after all expenses and salaries, etc.

I think we'd live in a better world if a company like Apple didn't exist to make ever increasing profits, but existed just to create the products they create.
Honestly I've always shared a perspective much like this until yesterday someone mentioned that through the stimulus (I'm not sure of the figures, but what I roughly recall is) each citizen gets $1200 they're then taxed on, and companies get the balance as an interest free loan. If the balance of the stimulus had been simply evenly distributed to individuals, everyone would have received nearly $10,000.

I can't imagine what would happen if you gave every citizen 10k. I would think there would likely be something akin to a revolution that may or may not result in a more robust economy. What the gov't is doing by giving so much money to existing companies that have already failed vs individuals with the possibility of failing is very much protecting the existing social structure of society.

Corporations like these are a hierarchy that generate implicit social striations in our society. By maintaining this regardless of the fundamental success of the product or competence of the management, they act only to preserve the class structure enforced by the institution and thus the stability of society in a configuration with marginal utility as regards productivity.

They're clearly ensuring their own future.
And a lack of better places to put the money.
Why you are not hiring proper support staff?
I still have a bunch of MiniDiscs but my player stopped working. Can anybody recommend a place to buy a new one ? I've looked at some of the usual places but haven't found any.
Yes, but it is a zero-sum game. When you get leads, someone else is loosing. So, this does not help economy and does not help all small businesses equally. It only helps Google as it is free advertisement for them.
The best interview process is not going to account for bad corporate policy, terrible bosses, or other confounding factors.
UK releases 'Gob-smacking' vision for future transport
Improve your Serverless development experience with sls-dev-tools 0.1.3?
Cart before the horse. Societally we're still trying to figure out who even has the virus! This disease isn't just some kind of trial everyone just needs to get through, especially as doing so will overwhelm the medical system.

Rather than pushing the narrative of "restarting the economy", this time invoking the few people who have immunity, let's focus on reducing the growth rate and otherwise recovering from where two months of inaction and incompetence has left us - eg produce and distribute enough masks for everyone to wear one in public. After the numbers start to level off, then we can talk about how to prudently relax the draconian restrictions that were made necessary.
> experts on topics far outside their expertise to be considered healthy

I've noticed this more recently on HN as well.

There are a few areas where I'll actually know what's going on under the hood in the specific niche area of industry or wherever, but then I'll come on HN and see the top comment completely off base, with maybe one or two refutations of that comment way down at the bottom. There's no actual verification by experts for each topic (not sure how there could be though).

I also notice this happens more the farther away from HN's core focus area the subject matter is on. Internet security? Tons of great advice. Boeing? It gets a little iffier, with a lot of armchair small prop pilots, who give you a completely different outlook than going and talking to a pilot who actually flies large jets for decades (but then wait a bit longer and pilots who fly large jets for decades show up on HN, which is cool - and no offense to the small prop pilots, I actually enjoy reading a lot of that discussion). US Patent law? You see some very outright false info on HN, I guess because while there are some very good patent lawyers here, there aren't very many. Also HN being a global platform inevitably leads to discussions on law getting completely mixed up.

But then of course Gell-Mann Amnesia sets in and I keep reading anyways. :)

The moderation here is pretty strong for keeping it civil and polite, which helps HN be a much less anxiety-inducing place.
Furthermore, the unstated unknown that many interviewers have on their mind is whether the candidate will be successful in this specific company.
I don't get what introvert has to do with focus.

Besides that, if you really need to stay off your phone, consider a "distraction free" phone as outlined in the book Make Time by Jake Knapp. Its a solid book but you can also glean that part of it from his blog:

https://medium.com/make-time/six-years-with-a-distraction-fr...

His version might be extreme for some. At the very least disable all notifications (save maybe texts from your SO/children) and delete social media apps.
Do you you have any fact-based evidence that certain bugs/anti-patterns would happen less in open source code bases or free software code bases?

Well, security by obscurity might happen a bit less. And hopefully many bugs in contributions are spotted instead of being merged because the author thinks it should work. But all major open source projects have had amazingly "stupid" programming bugs that went undiscovered for many years. Or the same feature has been patched again and again, but still causes more trouble.

Knowing that many company-internal software projects work with little review and very low testing coverage, it should be natural that their code quality is even worse. But that certain kinds of problems would only occur in closed source does not sound evident to me.
Great ad hominem, but I can't resist responding even though you're basically just repeating the same (wrong) argument multiple times.

> The over capacity modeling is incredibly difficult to do.

I never stated otherwise. And I'm not asking anyone to model anything. I'm just saying we'll be over capacity at a near point in the future. That seems like a pretty defensible extrapolation, but would love to hear how that's not the case.

> Please stop trying to spread additional gloom and doom about a part of this future most people have no control over.

Why? This is the world we live in currently. What you call "gloom and doom" others would call being cautious.

> There are already novel ideas to address that issue being put into use and capacity is ramping up rapidly.

Ideas. Let's hope they come to fruition. In the meantime, let's not kid ourselves about the risk to the non-elderly.

> Modeling the future is incredibly difficult.

Again irrelevant. I never claimed otherwise.

> If you think it is so easy

I don't think it's easy

> Spread fear about uncontrollable and unpredictable future events is wildly irresponsible.

I'm not "spreading fear". I'm debating an issue with most analyses currently being done in that they don't apply to the overcapacity scenario. And I disagree that's an irresponsible argument to make. Indeed, I can't see how turning a deaf ear to this most reasonable extrapolation that we'll soon be over capacity isn't the most irresponsible of the two.
Why do you think it's like this? Are those left expressing the nihilism of the rejected? Surely, the successful (the kind of success that YCombinator strives for) are eternally optimistic.
Heavy CAPEX doesn't require no profits, but it can easily result in that.
Teller won the lawsuit in 2014: https://www.courthousenews.com/teller-gets-545000-in-magic-f...
Google 2AM in New York (reports local equivalent time) or 4PM in New York in Shanghai (specify the timezone you want conversion to using another place name).
It wouldn’t be the same pay. But, they would be working, and providing taxes and local spending in their communities.

The maritime provinces have a very high average age in part because many workers left for alberta. This cuts the tax base.

That was my point. The workers do get a higher wage in Alberta, but most of this benefit is spend within Alberta or taxed there. Good for workers, good for Alberta....but not obviously a win for the rest of Canada.

And again, Alberta didn’t have to pay for 18 years of schooling and child health care for these workers: that was paid by the home province.
Or with a well-known phrase: garbage in, garbage out.
You can just use a POP3 client.
Sorry, but we are long past the point of calling out privacy advocates as "tinfoil hat wearers" - just look at everything that came out after Snowden. Beforehand, most people would have derided others for mentioning "such conspiracy nonsense" (I likely would have myself), and yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core, paranoid conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.

Since 9/11 in particular, the Western world has seen constant attempts to increase mass surveillance, lower the burden of proof, and dampen human rights, always in the name of whatever they have the public most fearful of at the time - drugs, terrorists, paedos, criminals, the Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, communists, Islam, foreigners taking our jobs, the boogey man de jour.

I'm absolutely certain that we'll see politicians try to use coronavirus as an excuse for their Orwellian schemes.
'flat' only if you see through the shenanigans; otherwise, EPS (earnings per share) have increased, by reducing the outstanding shares.

When interest rates are low, firms can finance to buy back. Not only that, investors shift their investments to stocks, instead of bonds. Two forces are at work to pump stocks, both forces are products of low interest rates.
Playing Nothing but Half-Life: Alyx in VR Made Me Hallucinate
Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await
Thank you! It seems you are right
Hold on. I'm an admin on a few paid GApps things. One got locked out, removed me, switched phone numbers, made a mess. Then owner hit me for help, I went through the channels with G and we were back on in a few hours/next day. This was only three months ago. The process was largely automated, IIRC there was one 15 minute call.
it wont
They are working on it: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758. Unfortunately, I think WebRTC support is still not 100% uniform across browsers (there seem to be a range of browser-specific behaviour and bugs), making it hard to easily support all browsers. And Chrome appears to be the browser which implements new WebRTC features the fastest, so I can understand Jitsi Meet focusing their efforts on that platform.

You don't need chrome though, chromium should be enough.
>capacity to scale production and lower lead time

How has that been working out? What happens when factory employees fall ill?
I took it as instead of texting, or checking social media, you're alone with your own thoughts.

For people who want something to do with their phone when they're bored, but hate social stuff.
Noob Question: Anyone know an easy way to convert FIPS data (that this nytimes dataset uses) to Postal code?
> It is primarily dangerous to the elderly. That is what the actual data shows.

Right, because the mortality rate for people under intensive care is skewed towards the elderly / people with underlying health conditions because they can't weather the ICU storm.

My point is that data is irrelevant for the scenario in which people go without intensive care. We have no idea how deadly COVID-19 will be then (or at least I haven't seen any data on those cases)
imo, “mostly”. its my impression that this community is very defensive at times, especially when it comes to issues of inequality along gender lines
Defined benefit pensions for government employees are invested in the market too, and everyone is exposed to that risk by way of being subject to taxes.
All teams should be selective. But if you don't have a Google-sized brand and budget, you need to develop a clearer understanding of your teams strengths/weaknesses and needs.

This understanding will enable you to figure out which hiring criteria do you need to maximize vs. which do you need to satisfy and where the bar is.

Also, by interviewing more effectively, you punch above your weight by spending more face-to-face time selling your company/team/role.
Just to further highlight the lunacy of that definition, most people's "government" is their employer if you define government in that manner.
You can't really deny that ABCT hasn't been accurate in predicting the results of ongoing QE.

I get mainstream econ looks down on it, but given the fact sticking strictly to Keynesian thinking has led to businesses being incentivized to create faulty product (Boeing), committing outright fraud (Wells Fargo), causing widespread destruction through abdication of due diligence (PG&E), exploiting addictive chemicals for business growth and engaging in unscrupulous price gouging (Shkreli, Pharma st al), and our current economic powerhouses are increasingly centered around consumer finacialization (every bloody major tech company), and for God's sake, Juicero happened; I'm honestly curious if the Austrian's might not be on to something.

Maybe the market does need to crash down to the basics. I just don't know if there is really a way for that to happen at this point given how capital is so damn centralized right now.

The problem is I just don't think it would be politically possible in the slightest to actually just sit back and hands off; and even if someone were that bold, they'd basically have just proven that there is no reason for them to exist as an institution anyway.

Which I don't necessarily think is an inconceivable state of affairs, but I don't see the economists of the world throwing in the towel and admitting that willingly.
Hol' up.

> blood 3/307 (1%)

Why isn't their blood rotten with virus?
A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What a waste.

Unless you get rescued here by a personal favor of a Googler, I would imagine that account is good as dead.
Doesn't Google takeout remain functional even for locked accounts ? You can download anything in that mail account even when it's blocked.
YC SuS library Growth list with track feature
"Hard Interviews, Happy Workers". This note near the end assumes correlation shows causation, which it does not. You could also argue that more workers want to work in certain jobs, creating more competition and leading the company to make interviews harder. The workers in those jobs may be happier, but not because the interviews were harder.
How to Monetize a Website with Rewarded Video Ads
(I've replied to your claim about getting banned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705285)

> Hacker News is a great reflection of SV at large

More than 90% of HN's community is outside of SV, and the bulk of the community here is actually rather disposed against it (or their image of it).
Some of the points here are good, but I think some of them are too simplistic.

This article makes a huge assumption: that performance is the only factor you're hiring for, and therefore unstructured interviews are worthless. That would make sense if you're interviewing for a factory of emotionless robots. But humans are social beings, and human performance as a team is more complicated than a sum of individual productivity. You need to take into account the affect that the hire would have on the entire team. Just about everyone has an anecdote about a coworker sometime during their career that was super productive, but completely demoralizing to the team. This is a very valid reason to give unstructured interviews, and if you ask smart people who give them, this is what they're looking for.

I totally agree with the utility of work-sample tests. There is nothing better to see someone's performance than simply giving them a small but relevant chunk of work to do. It is very important to keep them short and flexible though.

If you make them too lengthy, you'll skew the results against people who have better things to do with their time. What kind of person works for free anyway? Certainly not the caliber of people I want to work with.

And if you make the test too specific to certain technologies, you skew the test against smart engineers who are less familiar with that tech. If you want a problem solver, give them a problem in plain words, and let their solution be open-ended.

I don't agree with making tests particularly hard, though. Make it nuanced, yes, but of normal difficulty for a given assignment. You need the appropriate people to do the job. If you only hire top-tier algorithmic experts for your basic CRUD app, then you're going to have a very expensive CRUD app with a bored and demoralized team. If someone does sloppy work, you can spot this on a normal exercise as much as you can on an unreasonably difficult one.
You'd like to change the subject, but you haven't. I run uBlock Origin to encourage publishers to run their own non-privacy-violating ads from their own domains, the way they did before the ubiquity of surveillance capitalists. Every time publishers have asked me why I use uBO, I've told them that. That they can't adjust to market conditions, is their own failure of imagination. This impasse won't last forever, anyway. Today's unimaginative publishers will eventually be replaced by new ones with new models we haven't even considered yet.
Unless you dilute the water until it becomes homeopathic anti-shark water.
It isn't being used just for comp sci lectures though, it's being used for all sorts of things, e.g. union organising, prayer meetings. (And even for Comp Sci it tells an observer who goes to which university and the class(es) they take.)

Frankly I find your comment dismissive of the real threats faced by women and minorities.
Even a 99.9% sensitivity will miss a few times when you're testing millions of people.