skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I helped migrate an application from a mainframe to a modern microservices architecture. I'm not sure what happened but they forgot or intentionally didn't include provisions to train end-users to move the front-end to a modern architecture (like an SPA) so we had to...reproduce terminal green screens in Angular.
Defining the metrics that matters for startups
I want to learn how to build a phone, maybe something like the pine64 and librem phones. I'm a web dev so it's..challenging. How do I learn to:

* understand the hardware components required in a phone?

* understand the software components required? postmarketos and plasma mobile maybe?

* How do I even start to build a prototype? What components would I use? Maybe start with using a raspberry pi to make a DIY phone?

I know this is an open ended question, so any pointers would be appreciated.
One of the first mods I ever got into was the original TF. Too bad I pinged like 200 m/s from the majority of the servers so at best I could log in and spam grenades before I died. lol.
Oops, I was brain dead yesterday.

It's 90 cm long, and weighs about 2.1 kg.
Systems Thinking, mainly through reading Russell Ackoff's books. The Art of Problem Solving is good, Turning Learning Right Side Up is eye-opening (and definitely one of my favorite books lately) and currently reading Redesigning Society. Highly recommended.
German, should lower the barrier to emigrate
Ask HN: Are there certain teams that consistently win hackathons?
If so, what are the team's names / is there a site that shows hackthon teams ranks by wins?
Ask HN: What should be next step if IT company is laying off?
This has somehow morphed into a conversation about You. And I don’t find it interesting enough to participate.
> In my opinion, RFCs should strive to limit the optional parts of a specification at a minimum

If only USBIF had done that
Our nightly games are played on local servers with 13ms pings, but we still have international matches played on midpoint servers, with most players pinging between 150-200ms. Holds up very well.
https://astronomer.io offers a managed platform and installation into your cloud or data center.

Great product experience, fully open source. Gives your people using Airflow a sweet UI so they don't need to go CLI
Consolidation of our economy has been disastrous. Is this a good argument for a straight revenue tax on companies over a certain market cap? Incentivize then to break themselves up?

E.g. companies over $100b pay a 5% revenue tax. Over $500b pay a 10% revenue tax.
one word: crowdsource.
Indeed, today it is 1.5%. 7 days ago it was 0.75%. 14 days ago it was 0.375%. It has literally doubled each week.
Nice! I just did a simple roguelike in Rust a few months ago. I somewhat regret not looking at what it would take to make is work with wasm from the beginning, though.
In college, everything I owned could fit into a ridiculously small car.

After school, measured my minimalism by counting the things I owned. As long as over half of them had been given to me, I was doing good.

Living with other people for awhile, find myself sometimes fantasizing about if I could get my life down to two steamer trunks.
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No. It depends on where their experience lies and the balance of their skills.

For a startup, you want wide and somewhat shallow experience. Since everything is an experiment, you want to crank out features and see what sticks.

I.e. you want a programmer that can do some UI / some app logic / some data science / some database / some infra/ops, (Not unlike a special forces person).

If you come from a big company, most roles are very specific / very deep - for example, a person works for 2 years on a file system kernel.
Programming is not a particularly difficult skill. During the 1980s, it was taught in grade schools. JavaScript may be a worse and more difficult language than the ones you could find in the micros scattered across schools, but it's not an order of magnitude more difficult to use effectively.

In a field that goes hand-in-hand with programming, which includes pretty much every artistic one, it shouldn't be all that surprising that people know how to use/are at least curious enough to learn the tools available to them.
Calling something a minimum does not make it useful. I can find a minimum bound by taking the total number of deaths divided by total global population. But, while true that’s a worthless bound.

Also, if you’re using passenger demographics then you should use the number of passengers infected excluding the 145 infected crew average age 36.
Sketching on paper. There is a great free resource for learning how to sketch.

https://drawabox.com/
I'm sorry, I don't have the "possibility" to isolate myself, it's literally illegal for me to be outside right now!

As I said, all of things that impact us in our country, is told by us from the national government. Such as how you should act when going to the supermarket, if you need to present papers, what reasons you're allowed to be outside for and so on. Going through the news to get that information is just introducing unnecessary middlemen for information you get from either press conferences or straight from the government websites.

Everyone does not need to read the news. Follow the official guidelines, that's enough, and read them from the source. Then for the people who want to follow the news, follow it. But it's not a requirement for staying alive. At least where I live (YMMV).

> You may also be fined for failing to present specific papers when you leave your home for groceries, for which the requirement may have been announced a day prior.

Yeah, if they made it illegal to be outside without official papers, the government press conference would mention this + there would be information about this on the government websites. You're putting too much importance on "news" when there are official sources to hear/read from.
Oh wow, hehe, I wouldn't say so. Rancher is an off the shelf solution for many layers previous and after Kubernetes is set up, their solution is "complete" taking the ecosystem into account.

This is just an "in-house" Kubernetes managed service :)
We're essentially in agreement, then.
Yes, sounds like that could work. Like a wikipedia of experiments tried, with contact details and a public discussion forum for anyone interested in going deeper into the results.

In many fields, you can generally tell if someone is faking it about from how they respond and what they say. It's not that easy to fake specialized knowledge. This will help increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

The trick is to bootstrap a high-quality community, where top people in the field will want to engage. MathOverflow managed to do this for pure math. Quora on the other hand used to be good in the early days (many SV names) but has struggled to maintain quality. There's also the problem of moderating professional rivalry and reputation-maintenance in academia -- these are non-trivial issues in some smaller fields.
Animated Ticker Label in iOS
38000 tests in a country of 10 million. [1] Yeah, they have a handle on it alright. Seems pretty dumb to claim this at this point or to write this article and leave out that crucial figure. They have no fucking idea what's happening in their own country but are judging the rest of the world who is, at least, trying to learn from China and other places, if imperfectly and super late.

[1] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utb...
So, soon to be obsolete, abandoned by s/Adobe/Google/g? :-p

Just kidding, I'm building the mobile client for https://histre.com/ in Flutter and I love it. Google, please don't kill it yet.
Checking the news once a day for 15 minutes is more than sufficient. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people aren’t on Twitter, don’t know what push notifications are, and really don’t need to do anything other than stay at home, wear a mask, and avoid others. Constantly refreshing media sites really isn’t productive or helpful.
What inspired the BF compiler project?
I've been trying to build real systems with Microsoft's Durable Functions. I've been utterly fascinated by the patterns that have emerged on some of them.
My personal anecdatal arguement against "Hard to parse for humans" is... I actually really like generics residing within <>. It's actually harder for me to read generics denoted otherwise (D uses parentheses)

As for the last paragraph, I'd implore language implementors to continue using < > lest we get that awfully ambigous nonsense.
I built an expense tracker app using Flutter a while ago that I've been using for a year. It has really helped me in understanding where my money is going. To build it quick, it uses Google Sheets as a backend and BigQuery for running sql queries over the data. While everything works, it's quite slow so I'm looking at building the API server with rust warp and sqlite to store all transactions.
This. I was in a fintech/payments startup that actually survived the initial 2000 tech crash... had found product-maket fit and were closing major customer deals with Banks . But we still substantially cash flow negative (payment networks are great scale economy business but take time to ramp) and in process to raise another ~18 month runway... when sept 11 hit. After which all funders dried up. Years later, that same product we built did become hugely successful, under new ownership. This after the startup was sold in a firesale and all founder/employee equity was wiped out and everyone laid off. Not that unusual a story in startup land, but one were going to see more of this year. Weak business as well as viable ones, all thrown out with the bathwater when a severe economic shock hits.
Why not just buy a sim box instead?
At least his chances were bigger than the average Joe's. Probably he made a solid runway to last till his streams can recover.
Film treasures, streaming courtesy of the Library of Congress
> How does the Bose app talk to the device?

what options can there possibly be? it uses bluetooth.

> Wireshark can probably be used to analyze it.

bluetooth has reasonable security built in. bose products make use of it.
Face-API in JavaScript
I’m most likely wrong (I hope I am), but I’m worried about the long term economic effect this virus will have on the hospitals. Not right away, but over the next year. We have a large number of people needing hospital care for extended time (1 to 2 weeks), and a large number of unemployed. This will result in a lot of bankruptcies (even for people with health insurance). Will the health insurance industry be able to pay out all these clamps as well?

Anyway, I’m half expecting to see another massive bailout for hospitals, or the government just buy them outright in about a year.
Tips to Scale a Real Estate Investment Business
Amazon pays little tax because of all the losses it posts. One potential explanation for this might be that small cap companies have higher profits than large caps. If that was true they would pay more tax collectively. I have heard before that small caps tend to grow more but are higher-risk, and since there is a selection bias against companies that collapsed last year, I imagine you would find that of the companies paying tax this season small caps would be showing more growth. So, the causal chain I'm proposing would be:

Small caps have higher variance than large caps + Companies that go out of business aren't included in statistics -> Year-end statistics show small caps doing better than large caps.

Then,

Companies that do better on paper pay more tax + Small-caps do better on paper at year end -> small caps pay more tax than large caps.
Clojure!
I played around with common lisp a bit a some months ago, though I basically used none of the lisp specific features like macros.
After reading a few blog posts on functional programming and "the lisp way" I have decided to buy a book on Clojure. My end goal (for now) is to build a basic website with a backend.
Call your Congress-critters. I happen to benefit from being in Oregon, represented by Sen. Wyden, who opposes EARN-IT, but I know that many of y'all are in California may recognize Sen. Feinstein on the co-sponsor list [0]. Reach out now.

And, remember this next time she's up for re-election; this isn't her first time. She also co-sponsored PIPA [1] along with Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand, for the many of y'all in New York. You get who you vote for.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/339...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/968...
That’s the most ridiculous article I read this week. At this point the fact I can’t input < and > with my virtual Azerty on physical Japanese keyboard could make in it to make it more substantial.
What’s the Best Material for a Mask?
In my comment I specifically cited dividends in addition to buybacks as I agree they both represent money that was returned to shareholders and could have been saved.

I don’t agree with your claim that the companies are incentivized to be insolvent so they get nice bailouts or they’ll get left behind. Looking at the auto industry in 2008, GM desperately needed a bailout and got $18 billion and the government ended up taking over the company, going bankrupt, and then the assets were sold off cheaply to make a new company. How is that advantageous for the shareholders (who lost everything!) compared to the other auto companies like Ford which did not need a bailout and were simply forced to take a smaller amount of money (~$5 billion) to boost their coffers and build investor confidence during the crisis. Ford never needed the cash (except arguably as a confidence buffer) and never went bankrupt so the shareholders made out better.
Stupid question in case anyone here has a medical background.

I was under the impression that covid19 was a two step process. First the virus infects and attacks the protective layer of the lungs (causing cough and fever). Then, the damage done to the protective layer of the lungs results in an infection / pneumonia, and that's where people have respiratory problems and may be in critical condition. But at this stage the viral load is low and the virus isn't the problem anymore, the pneumonia is [1].

This is why I thought Pr Raoult was advocating for the use of chloroquine in the early days of the disease, combined with prompt testing.

But it seems that anti-virals (like the study mentioned in this post and other studies in the US and Europe) are tested on patients in critical phase, i.e. with serious cases of pneumonia. Am I missing something or should we not expect anti-virals to be of much use in those cases, as it is too late, we are not dealing with a virus but with a pneumonia?

[1] see this useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY
Cloud infrastructure is just such a trivially tiny cost compared to salaries that it's barely even worth thinking about. A year of my AWS bill would barely even pay a week of an engineer's salary. Traffic has scaled up by orders of magnitude and I've only had to make a few minor tweaks to keep things running smoothly.
I agree and that's what I'm advocating too, checking a trusted news source once a day.
Writing a Damn Good Readme File
Ask HN: How to store billions of rows of time-series data?
I'm trying to build a system to store price data. According to my calculations, I'm going to be inserting about 20 million rows every day. This will quickly add up to billions of rows.

The queries will be very ad-hoc, mostly things like histograms, and grouping by certain attributes. It's also possible that some of the products will rarely/never be queried, not sure if it makes a difference. Read performance is still more important.

Is something like TimescaleDB a good choice?

I would also like to not spend a fortune on this (couple hundred a month at maximum). So is this even possible with the cost constraint?
reminds me of this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Out of interest, why would people laugh at someone learning C? I know plenty of people using C in all manner of domains, choosing it over C++ or Rust for fair and sensible reasons - I'm not a C person myself, but it certainly seems extremely useful to have in the toolkit!
As with anything pharmaceutical - they still need to make sure it doesn't have long term side effects. As horrible as it is to prevent treatment and prolong suffering, it would be more horrible if thousands of people suffer from unknown side effects if they would have recovered without it.
Most large organizations are like this. At the megacorp I used to work for the running joke was that any change, no matter how small, to the legacy systems started at 1 year & 1 million dollars.
WordPress has a bookmarklet called “Press This” which sounds very similar: https://wordpress.com/support/press-this/
This structure seems to perpetuate the cycle.
>The safety and efficacy are not yet known so while we feel the greatest sense of urgency in our work with remdesivir, we must take the responsible, ethical approach of determining whether it is indeed a safe, effective treatment.

>we continue to provide remdesivir on an individual compassionate use basis for children and pregnant women.

Can someone explain this logic to me? The safety and efficacy is not known, so we're going to give it to the most vulnerable people first?
What are those patterns? I've used Azure functions a lot but never had (I think) a use case for durable ones.
> Remdesivir is still an investigational medicine and has not been approved by regulatory authorities anywhere in the world. The safety and efficacy are not yet known so while we feel the greatest sense of urgency in our work with remdesivir, we must take the responsible, ethical approach of determining whether it is indeed a safe, effective treatment. This is why multiple clinical trials for remdesivir are underway, involving thousands of patients with COVID-19 across the world.
searching "{bus route} {city} coronavirus" or "{grocery store location} coronavirus" is a much more effective way of getting this information than just reading the local news headlines for five minutes and hoping you see all the information that's relevant to you. polling the news every morning is not a good strategy for retrieving specific factual info.

when it comes to more complex things like "how bad is coronavirus about to be in the west?" reading the news for five minutes isn't nearly enough. for each story, you need to read writeups from several different publications before you can reconstitute anything like an accurate picture of what is happening. pick any important story and read the corresponding articles in the ny times, wsj, and maybe the washington post. it's really staggering how differently they present the facts (and which ones they choose to present at all). it takes a lot of work to come away from reading the news more informed rather than less.
But can't the theory be interesting in its own right, say, as a mathematical construct, at least?
Covid-19 Response: New Jersey Urgently Needs COBOL Programmers (Yes, COBOL)
If someone is going to die anyway, a research drug that might save them sounds pretty awesome.
Just about everyone I know had the symptoms some time in 2020, mostly before COVID got here.

It’s still the tail end of cold and flu season, after all.

Other than randomly testing the population, there doesn’t seem to be any statistically sound way to estimate the number of infections.
Graph Algorithms and Distributed Systems
We will probably have a better idea of where that line might be when the number of Americans who don't use the internet isn't measured in the millions. That number is about 25 million adults now.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FT_19...
Power struggle based on immediate and future system relevancy takes place within that frame (innovation), in a democracy that frame (human rights) shouldn't be broken because it damages the belief in the system itself. An informed society acts in its best interest, if it doesn't the education system or entire system is corrupted and broken.
Although the question is not directed at me, I've found exercise websites to be extremely valuable. I value learning/gathering experience by reading code, but I find the hands-on approach more stimulating.

My favourite resource right now is exercism.io. Although some tracks have too much of a high students/mentors ratio to be effective/practical in mentored mode (or to activate the mode at all), going through all the exercises (and community solution) is still a very effective way to learn a language (along with a textbook, of course).

Codewars is another interesting idea, however, it's much more grounded on computer science, which is not very well suited to just learning a language.
AIUI herd immunity can come only after the infection wave has passed. By then the damage will have been done.

Another concern is covid stresses will extend to social instability, and not just in the poorer countries. . That's going to be really unpredictable.
IIRC, the capable workers were the first gone to Galt's Gulch. The story dwells on slightly-less-bad business people running around like decapitated chickens trying to keep things working, but the real heroes just quietly noped out.
> There is enough imperfect evidence that this treatment stack [...] has benefits that it should be considered a potential part of a solution.

Is there any evidence? Do you have a link to the best evidence so far? Did someone tried a similar treatment and get the same result?

It is not necessary to have a perfect study, because there too little time. But how hard is to make a study with a randomized control group? You are not sure if this drug is better or worse, so giving only the standard treatment perhaps is better. I guess a double blind experiment is more difficult for logistic reasons, but if the patients have respirators and are sedated, it is almost a single blind experiment. And if the results are the number of death or an analysis in a lab by a machine (instead of self reports), they can be less influenceable.
That was my experience this week. I did went to Ralph's website to check their hours before going there.
So you advocate to not use any new molecule until we have studied the effects over 5-10 years?
My takeaway that this drug was for folks that are literally on their “last leg”. I don’t think potential aide effects are going to deter such a patient, at least it wouldn’t deter myself.

It’s tough to worry about a future when you don’t have one.
Did you happen to use this? https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/ If not, what did you use?
> removing waste is always beneficial. The problem isn't that the change isn't worthwhile. It's that a company's threshold for "significant" is too high

I don't disagree in theory. But convincing someone to spend time money on something with a low ROI is usually a challenge. A bunch of low ROI projects, coordinated over time, can provide a larger ROI when viewed strategically, but you have to have the right people in place to take that view.
Gilead is providing the entirety of this existing supply at no cost, to treat patients with the most severe symptoms of COVID-19. The 1.5 million individual doses are available for compassionate use, expanded access and clinical trials and will be donated for broader distribution following any potential future regulatory authorizations. These doses are for treating patients with severe symptoms, through daily intravenous infusions in a hospital setting. Having a potential treatment in our hands comes with significant responsibility. Providing our existing supplies at no charge is the right thing to do, to facilitate access to patients as quickly as possible and in recognition of the public emergency posed by this pandemic.

I'm glad to hear this!
You are quite optimistic.
It works but they don't have enough for everyone.
So in your article, you talked to someone on LI that changed your perspective, but I read that to be coincidental and circumstantial. I think these are good points, and not just for entrepreneurship. So especially for 3, how are you doing this more systematically?