skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Location : Gurgaon, IN seeking relo to Canada or Singapore
Remote : Yes, for some time
Willing to relocate: Only to Canada or Singapore
Technologies : Java, Android, Node.js, SQL, NoSQL, Javascript, C/C++, AWS, Bash, Jenkins. Familiar with Python, Go.
Résumé/CV : https://bit.ly/kunjan_resume
Email : kunjbhai@gmail.com
Patent : https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=08868506
Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunjan-aggarwal/
Github : https://github.com/kunjan-a

Generalist with masters in computer science and 8+ years of professional experience building internet based software products from the ground up (both for enterprises and end users).

Mostly worked in startups in fast-paced development environment, wearing multiple hats from front-end development (Android, Java, Actionscript, Javascript, C++, HTML/CSS) to back-end development (Java, Node.JS, Microservices, JSP), building automated test suite (Python, Perl) and finally handling CI/CD pipelines (AWS/Jenkins).

Have been actively involved in design stages and have seen through entire product life cycles with products failing, being pivoted multiple times and then finally becoming successful consumer/enterprise applications e.g. https://evolphin.com/ , https://flock.com , https://www.ringo.co/

Looking for sponsored relocation to Canada or Singapore.
I agree, this level of synthetic concern doesn't feel like "grass roots".

MS did a terrible job with Skype and Lync. No doubt they were expecting to be able to bind it to exchange server and then create a coupling that embedded into an effective monopoly, creating yet another bad user experience that somehow becomes "the norm".

Hopefully at some point MS will compete by improving their products and we will have a better WFH experience.
I wonder how often this "being insulted" thing is really a thing.

I worked with a lot of interns in my time. Almost everyone seemed to greatly overestimate their productivity / use. The internships we offered were NOT net moneymakers / all that useful. They were more PR, random chance of finding someone good enough to hire.

Maybe I wasn't seeing how many internships work but straight out of or in college into an internship is a real roll of the dice productivity wise in my experience.

No doubt at the top schools / top candidates are different, but most, I'm skeptical of.
If you don't refactor and update your dependencies regularly you can easily end-up in a corner.

You can be hit by a bug in your dependencies, be it a functional one or a security one, but if your dependencies are completely out of date and there is tons of API incompatibilities between the version you are using, and the version implementing the bug fix, it will be really painful and take a long time to update, with stakeholders breathing down your neck expecting a fix asap.

Also, maintaining old tool chains can be a real drag (maintaining older building hosts, developer machines or VMs).

Updating frequently to be near enough the latest version is generally preferable.
Have you watched the supply chains? Spikes in demand followed by demand collapse have already wreaked havoc. From what I read from people from that business, there's total chaos.

And even if the elderly bear most of the risk, countries are shutting down completely for their sake - and that means companies stopping operations, leading to further disruptions. Also this article: US already has 10 million unemployed, and it barely started to consider doing anything about the virus.

I think this is closest to actual doomsday since the peak of Cold War.
The Spiral Approach to Thinking and Learning
> It's just a module bundler.

It is how Webpack works, actually. Webpack does not support bundling to native ES6 modules [0], it has to bundle into a format which requires runtime code being injected to execute properly, handling imports, and whatnot instead of relying purely on native ES6 modules.

Have you ever looked at the contents of a bundle? [1]

Long story short, Webpack circumvents native ES6 modules in favor of other module formats. It provides a great amount of utility, but it is not Vanilla JS.

[0] https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/2933
[1] https://pastebin.com/C2qPunwV
I think the biggest misconception here is in fact what I'm proposing doesn't actually change much. Legalizing noncommercial infringement is just affirming the reality we already live with. Millions of people are noncommercially infringing every day. To the extent that it undermines your business model, that undermining has been priced into your business model for decades because people who don't want to pay are already not paying. What I'm asking people to consider is new and innovative ways to bring those people who will never pay you into your business model instead of pretending they don't exist or publicly shaming them as pirates. Better to have the freeloaders watch your ads or something than to let the ad revenue go to pirate sites.
If that's the case, then wouldn't both "asdf" and "qwer" be printed to the console when executing the following code?

function test() {
switch (true) {
case console.log('asdf') === undefined: return 1;
case console.log('qwer') === undefined: return 2;
}
}
test();
>I think this is overly simplistic. There are a lot of gradations in between.

You think I'm not aware of the gradations?
This looks super familiar, I think I used the french edition back in '83!

Thanks for sharing, brings back lots of good memories!
Hospital Diary: A Photographer Chronicles the Covid Crisis
It is funny you mention it. My SO works at a doctor's office and they only started that kind of monitoring two days ago. Best practices are only starting to emerge so I am willing to give Amazon some slack here.

It is still late.
(I'm a Tailscale co-founder) The idea is to avoid building yet another commercial service that holds onto your username and password. People have enough identities already. More details here: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/

We know we keep getting feedback that people want a different way to authorize their accounts (especially for personal use), so we're looking at other options. We just really want to stay out of the username+password business; it's simply bad security practice.
It will be much worse than ‘08. It already is; it just hasn’t hit tech yet. (I’d guess that will take about a year — that’s how long it took for the dot com crash to spread to the rest of the economy.)

The question is whether it will be worse than the Great Depression, when there were two follow on crashes of similar magnitude. The stimulus is trying to prevent the last crash from growing into a second crash.

The main thing governments can do to overcome the economic crisis is to admit defeat and get it over with. Delaying gives time to build hospital space and improve treatment regimes, but, at best, that halves the death toll. (Unless we find a cure for the common cold this year.)

Putting it in perspective, getting COVID-19 roughly doubles your chance of dying this year, regardless of your age (except kids, which are much better off). If 100% of the population catches it tomorrow, it will reduce average life expectancy in the US by about a month (at most). If we rationally allocated the $10T’s the COVID-19 response is costing, we could end global warming and also increase life expectancies by way more than a month. Doing that would be political suicide.

Speaking of which, the lockdown does have one other benefit: it lets politicians time the collapse of the hospital system until after the next election. This seems to be exactly what the US is planning to do (the second peak of deaths is scheduled for late November / December). Also, making big sacrifices gives people an impression of strong leadership.

So far this strategy is working well for the politicians. Trump’s approval ratings are at an all time high, despite the fact that he repeatedly mismanaged the crisis. So are Cuomo’s, even though Newsom’s (California’s) handling of the crisis was much more decisive and successful so far.

It reminds me of the effect where you have an incompetent “firefighter” software developer that causes a string of crises, and then heroically “saves” the company over and over, gets promoted for it, and then promotes more fire fighters.
1) Very hard to say. As others have commented, we have not seen anything of this nature before, where governments have essentially made it illegal for perhaps ~40% of the workforce to work with no end in sight.
2) One thing that keeps occurring to me over the last few weeks are the parallels to war. It seems like people are always obsessed with "fighting the last war" and when usually the current war is really nothing like the last war. The truth is, the current situation is not really comparable to 2008 due to its causes and in my mind the severity and length of recovery will highly depend on how long it continues.

At least in the US, governments seem to be stringing the country along with "just a little longer" promises, but as the virus continues to explode despite unprecedented restrictions it seems increasingly unlikely that we're going to see a return to normal any time in 2020. Businesses and individuals who could have easily survived a month of shutdown are going to be unable to survive for 6-9 months of shutdown and things are going to start getting very chaotic.

3) Weird. Some sectors of the economy are going redline as demand surges, but others are going to flatline.

4) They'll print money and pray that we can pull out of the dive. This is going to be much easier for some countries (US) than others (Euro zone). It will be very interesting to see how quickly politicians are willing to acknowledge that they're not facing a short-term issue, but rather a long term issue with a ton of uncertainty.
Year ago I made a demo video about an OS I'd been working on. I (cont)
What does trust even mean for most of their output? For music radio it's irrelevant. For comedy it's irrelevant. Trust enters the equation when things get serious and there's an aspect of teaching or communication of information involved.

The BBC's news output is symptomatic of a deeper set of political biases, it invades everything they do. Anyone can make a music radio station, many documentaries and dramas are produced by the private sector and then simply bought. There's nothing the BBC does that isn't already done just as well by other organisations, which is why they so often fall back on vague assertions of superior levels of trustedness or quality.
I started to look into going vanilla JS for a side project and ended up going with Svelte instead. Worth checking out.

https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-3-rethinking-reactivity
It doesn't, but it helps keep people separated. I did notice each cashier had their own bottle of hand sanitizer, so that could help if they used it after each transaction. Personally, I would still want gloves and a surgical mask if I were them.
I've had exactly the opposite experience -- I've found state machines to be "spaghetti code reducers" -- no longer checking a "bag of flags" to decide how to respond to the event.

For example, the "up" volume button on your phone could mean ringer adjust, MP3 playback volume adjust, take a photo, increase screen brightness, etc. In other words, it depends on what the phone is doing, i.e. its state.

Otherwise, code becomes "if (in_call == true) { adjust_volume(); } else if (camera_mode == true) { take_photo(); } else if ...

Just my 2 cents...
is public assistance also entirely disconnected?

sure, they will lay people off or furlough them. there's genuine problems with work at the moment. but do they want help beyond that?
I wasn't pretending it was about anything. I was nothing if buyback's hadn't happened and they had cash... the incentive is to lay people off who aren't working.

That's just how things work right now.

Same would go with "lower prices and higher salaries"... the result in the article happens just the same.
Start with something smaller or find an interested wealthy patron. Same options as if I wanted to start a business that will take years of development to achieve traction.

How does anyone get a following? You build it over time.
This response from Amazon is better than nothing, but given that recent figures show that up to 25% of people may be asymptomatic, might these temperature checks give people a false sense of security? They should have any employee with _any_ symptoms stay home and self-quarantine for longer than 3 days.

They should really focus on getting face masks for employees faster by using nonmedical fabric masks, which can help prevent asymptomatic transmission by blocking respiratory droplets from spreading. The article says the surgical masks won't arrive until next week. And they should really be using some alternative fabric mask, rather than surgical masks which should go to healthcare workers.

Each day that interventions are delayed makes a huge difference.

More thoughts at https://shouldiwearafacemask.com

(Edited to remove suggestion to close until they get masks with a compromise to use nonmedical fabric masks.)
There is nothing in that article or that individuals opinions supporting such a claim with any form of evidence whatsoever. This is the sort of loose claim you can recall later on and regardless of what sort of recovery we see, still be able to tell everyone that you were right.
All this while Walmart and other Grocery Stores (DFW, TX) can't seem to restock Milk or Cheese in any meaningful quantities. It is shocking to experience how poorly our supply chains are managed and how quickly they break down all while the talking heads keep telling us that our food supply is plentiful.

Just in time should not be allowed in the food or pharma industry.
> What often happens is that UB gets detected and information that is clearly available in the source code gets erased in the compiler to follow the letter of the standard.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this. I agree that compilers have gotten a lot better about deriving information from UB analysis in the past decade or two, but I think a lot of the time it gains information from the additional analysis rather than ignoring existing information.

The main example I can think of for a compiler ignoring information from the source code is strict aliasing, where the compiler can ignore the fact that two addresses can be statically proven to point to the same memory location [0] (although to be fair that's from 2009; I'm not sure whether GCC still does this).

For stuff like null pointer dereferences, signed overflow, or OOB dereferences, though, the compiler can (sometimes?) derive stricter bounds, which means the compiler is gleaning more information from the source code than it has previously.

[0]: https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg...
We build the computer accessory Luna Display[0] which turns your iPad or extra Mac into a second display - particularly useful for working from home!

We were originally pure software people, so it's been fun and challenging to explore the hardware space. I've found it to be a lot like software development but with much much longer "compile times" aka manufacturing.

[0] - https://lunadisplay.com
Unfortunately this is still a very narrow vision of what is possible with RGBZ or just Z. You won't want to strap an iPad to a robot, or mount a bunch of iPads on your ceiling, or below your TV connected to your game console.
Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.
Leading Through a Pandemic with Denelle Dixon
Don't trust this source... the article sounds like a cheap plug for Nike particularly near the end where it oddly starts talking about how Nike is a great buy.
I'd say the bigger problem with vanilla JS or any other imperative UI framework is exactly that, the imperative nature of these tools. React introduced the frontend world to a declarative approach for keeping the DOM in sync with your state. Until we have something similar in the native API, React and co. will continue to exist.
Just updated on my oneplus3 after reading this!
Percent infected = 0.012%; Percent unemployed = 2.1%; I hope it is all worth it.
Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
I was looking for this exact functionality some months ago, nice. Didn't find any pricing but I'll give it a try, for sure
Ask HN: Demand for a less complex, yet beautiful alternative to PDFs?
Hi HN,

I recently found myself in a rather annoying situation of having to fork out money for software to edit a PDF. I was irritated because (a) it is not a task I have to do often, and (b) because adjusting a bit of text should simply not be that complicated!

That led me to think that the PDF format is a bit too complicated for the vast majority of use cases, and perhaps an alternative format may be more appropriate. All you essentially require is a format that is capable of storing text, their positions, images (inc SVG), and perhaps even embedded fonts - plus, you need a capable reader that can render that format into a nice looking, scalable document.

Having looked at the spec for PDFs, it's clear the PDF can do a lot (including embedding javascript!), however I think the complexity is unnecessary.

Before I go all in and try to replace the PDF with my own format + reader, do you think this is a worthwhile exercise? Does another alternative already exist? Are you also irritated by the fact that PDFs, while beautiful, are more difficult to edit than they need to be?

Thanks, and stay safe!
It really depends how much complexity you shift to js - if most of the work is done on the server, you really don't need to lean on js very much and you can have relatively simple js which just annotates certain elements and updates content in response to user actions. You don't need a framework if you're not trying to shift the entire view layer to js.
> The LAPD have been careful not to cite information from this software in court documents so that its constitutionality cannot be challenged.

Parallel construction strikes again, sadly.
Note for anyone who's not aware, a "tax credit" is basically free money. It's not the same as a deduction, which only reduces your taxable income. A credit directly reduces the amount of taxes you owe, and in most cases if the credit reduces the amount you owe to a negative number the IRS will pay you that money.
That does happen with bread at least. I grew up in a place where shopping at the "canned food store" and "bread store" was common. These were places that sold food that had expired off the shelves of other stores at steep discounts. Sometimes the food was just given away by grocery stores, too.
I'm not an expert, but, if in the described scenario the cashier doesn't touch their face and they frequently wash hands/change gloves, I don't think this method of transmission is as effective as close proximity transmission via the humid air coming in and out of your nose and mouth.
Looks really interesting! For my use case I'd really want that Android app, but other than that this looks solid.
"restoring adults to leadership"

with Biden (or any of the dems)? Hah! Good luck with that...
At some point, managers have to get from incompetent to competent. That's invariably going to involve trying out various techniques, and if those techniques have known expected results, it helps the individual evaluate whether they're getting it right.

Thus, frameworks and guides and such have a pedogogical value.
Then what part of my statement was false?
You're correct, but let/const don't have full support in IE11 either.
I understand that people are still supporting IE, but still, this website could stay relevant longer if the examples were written in ESNext.
actually, you might. if you foresee a bad season followed by a quick ramp up, three month redudancy payouts and then talant scouting, you might well pay them to do nothing.

if you forsee a bad year, yeah, i think you probably lay them off under those conditions.
It's hard to keep that mindset when you end up getting a lion's share of the world's wealth and power from your technology. How can you distrust yourself and your people, then?
They really should have been doing temperature checks a month ago. Amazon is pretty critical infrastructure right now. Many people would be up a creek if Amazon had to shut down.
Yeah, that makes sense. The specifics of what you're doing certainly will drive what the implementation looks like. It makes sense that using Omniture for tests means that pure JS DOM manipulation is the best way forward. This detail is actually incredibly important to your story, and so I think it's easier than not to draw the wrong conclusion from the story because that important detail was left out. Omniture testing might be something a lot of candidates aren't exactly clamboring to spend their time doing. Certainly, with an A/B testing job I would be hoping and aspiring to learn more about things like site UX, maybe some data science, do HTML & JS that is relevant to the business team, and be involved in the production site's implementation and design, etc. I would personally be less excited about using an older legacy testing framework that requires low level DOM hacking, especially if it seemed separated from the core dev team. How do you implement the design that wins? Does the A/B test writer's version get put into production, or does someone else take the code injection and translate it into HTML?
That entire example in general reads more like a cautionary tale about coding yourself into overly-specific clunk in the service of staying 'vanilla'. The 'type' of things being sorted is hardcoded into the html of the table and the actual js code. The comparator function has specific logic just to handle ascending and descending sorts of that that particular table. This one 'simple' example is already more convoluted and brittle than it would be even if you 'reinvented' your own framework-like thing.
The temperature checks and reviewing video are new, but they've been saying they will provide masks for a while but have been running into shortages actually procuring them.

If we assume most transmission is asymptomatic, this is largely a PR move that buys Amazon some time, but doesn't change much, except maybe the price they're willing to pay for masks.
>Even if I'm in the first group, I still need to know things like correct dosage, drug interactions, purity, etc in order to safely self-administer.

Nothing prevents one from asking for help, does it?
I don't really see that analogy. The situation is more along the lines of choosing between losing my nose or my face.
Covid-19: First results of the voluntary screening in Iceland
Not an OS but I have to note that it's not supported in some older versions of Jenkins and wasn't officially fixed until fairly recently https://issues.jenkins.io/browse/JENKINS-30319
All of these steps have already been going on at my local Whole Foods for almost two weeks now. I don't know if it was a single-store thing or a broader Whole Foods thing, but it has been weird to me seeing people harp on Amazon's response to this when the Whole Foods near me has been the only business seemingly implementing any safety measures.

It was weird at first, but everything went smoothly after the initial weirdness of people obliviously walking past the line in front of the store and trying to go inside only to be told to turn around and stand in line.
Looks like it’s a completely custom blog engine judging by some of their other posts so you could probably ask them to add that feature if it’s not already there.
People really undervalue the awesomeness of not having to set up an account to use an online service.
The big takeaway for me is the MPW emulator that lets you run the tools from MPW.

Gonna give that a go!