skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of a business isn't to employ people, it's to make money. Often times PE firms are buying companies that are going to go out of business unless dramatic changes are made (like newspaper companies). I think we can all agree that cutting half the staff of a company is better than the company going out of business and everyone losing their jobs.
What about const/let is poorly designed?
The warning being that it doesn't matter because it doesn't affect their share price right? So far I haven't seen any tangible damage to them when it comes to $$.
ideally, there would be a 3rd path, which would be direct forgiveness of those debts for a small period. All creditors would take the haircut, instead of the debtors. this means that incoming money would go back into the productive economy.

The odd thing about bailouts is that if you bailout businesses, they can't really spur consumer demand, and if you give it to individuals it tends to end up re-concentrated in the financial economy. If you want to ensure cashflow into the open economy, you need to ensure that the money that people have gets spent on goods, not financing.
Using Twilio to make a call forwarding and voice messaging system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761712
Really sorry to everyone who is out of work now :(, I wish I could do more then just give you some links and thoughts but hope this helps.

1. If you're looking to ramp-up your skills Pluralsight is giving away a free month of training this month: https://www.pluralsight.com/offer/2020/free-april-month

2. Large companies are still hiring I growth areas, I am not 100% sure but If I was a betting man anything at Google, Amazon or Microsoft that is cloud related is probably still booming to get people on board

3. If you wind up finding some work that is remote in this situation and don't have WFH experience check out this great set of tips for WFH by Scott Hanselman: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/LoveInATimeOfCoronaVirusTipsT...
VIVA Finance | Junior Full Stack Engineer | Midtown Atlanta | Full-Time | viva-finance.com

VIVA Finance provides affordable, low-interest unsecured personal loans to employees of companies that bring on VIVA as an employee benefit provider. Our loans are underwritten on employment tenure instead of credit score, allowing us to offer prime lending rates to everyone, even those with damaged or non-existent credit.

We are a FinTech startup with a rapidly growing user-base about to raise our Series A. We are looking to bring on a Junior Developer to add features to our lending platform as well as build out our data visualization capabilities.

Our tech stack runs entirely on AWS and is written in Node.js and Vue.js, but anyone with strong scripting/frontend skills in any language will be considered.

If interested, send me your resume (or similar): alex at viva-finance dot com
My understanding of the change they made was that it was expressly to deal with a condition with failing batteries where, as they were nearing the end of their life, they would just shut off abruptly when they still claimed to have 40% or more charge left -- the problem was that they could no longer deliver peak power, and if the phone tried to draw what was now too much power for something, it'd fail. The solution to that was to limit how much power the phone could draw.

I don't think it was intentionally nefarious -- this is a real problem with this kind of battery and I've experienced it, and it's not unique to Apple devices. In theory, their solution is actually pretty good! The problem was the way they communicated this to end users, namely, that they didn't. They just did it. And didn't even have iOS tell you it had enabled this "battery management" mode when it was turned on.

This wasn't an engineering fiasco, it was a PR fiasco. Apple has always been guilty of what we could diplomatically call "under-communicating," but this is the sort of change someone -- many someones, arguably -- internally should have flagged and said, "No, look, this isn't something we should just do silently, in part because it's going to create a suboptimal user experience and in part because if we don't communicate what we're doing and why we're doing it, it's going to come across as us just slowing old phones down to make you buy new ones."
I just checked, they put it on a 0% interest until further notice.
What a relief! You should have seen my severance package lol, peanuts.
The issue I have with `const` is not your original premise, but the one you allude to here: people confuse reassignment and immutability. Because of this, they end up using const/let to "signify that they're not changing a variable," when it doesn't actually matter anyway, because they're thinking of immutability but disambiguating reassignment capability. You can usually tell who has only a superficial understanding of the language by reading how `const` and `let` are used in their code.

Personally, I default to const, and use it pretty much 99.9% of the time. I use `let` in the few cases where it's actually useful to have a block-scoped variable. Ironically, this probably does a better job of "communicating" intent than the ritualistic obsession with "immutability" does, simply because you know if you're deviating from the default, there is a good reason for it.
> carry a government approved ID showing your immunities

Bill Gates is funding an effort to tattoo it into your skin [1].

At best, Mr. Gates is dangerously naive, assuming that because he has good intentions, governments will never abuse his idea for evil purposes.

Governments' track record on this subject is not great.

(The last time a government tried to tattoo a unique identifier into a large number of people, it was the Nazis. They wanted to keep track of Jews and other undesirables, so they could more efficiently be run through the systematic processes of captivity, enslavement and mass murder.)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill...
You have to declare the variable as `var` as well, eg.

var arr1 = [4, 2, 3, 6]
sort arr1

# Doesn't work
let arr2 = [4, 2, 3, 6]
sort arr2

You'll get a warning about the latter from the compiler (and nimsuggest for editors).
The Althttpd Webserver
Yea, no kidding, I wish apple would open source server.app, so some of the old components could be updated without hacking it. It was just a perfect all in one solution. I will check out Photostructure.
There's no such thing as a "full quarantine" for everyone. It's totally impossible.
There are very few places where you ever need to use let or var. const is solving important issues

- it has lexical scope instead var function scope
- it does not hoist like var
- it prevents accidental reassignment

Accidental reassignment happen more often in JS because of non-lexial scoping, weakly typed and async functions. Also, both Ruby and Python are "strongly typed" as opposed to weakly typed Javascript.
> Data reviewed did not demonstrate convincing evidence of toxicity from doses of thimerosal used in vaccines. In case reports of accidental high-dose exposures in humans to thimerosal or ethyl mercury toxicity was demonstrated only at exposures that were 100 or 1000 times that found in vaccines.
The market has crashed like 25%, so yes it is priced in to some extent. Also, small businesses aren't traded on the stock market, so I think it makes sense that the market wouldn't be affected by this. In the long run, small businesses failing probably helps companies like Amazon and Walmart, which are publicly traded.
Our product / tech team is mostly based in Barcelona (early team at least) but we'll actively grow our tech team in Latam as well - mostly Mexico City. Happy to get connected to folks you might think would be a good fit. :)
Summary:

1. Renters may lose their jobs, unable to pay rent.

2. Some landlords have jobs and so have to cover the mortgage and such; but they might also lose their jobs, going into foreclosure.

3. Thus renters can lose their home that way, even if the landlord lets them go without paying rent.

4. Thus, who is the winner? Why money landlords: banks!

Banks are not out of a job; they get to take people's houses.

If you want a pandemic-proof racket, start a bank.
Related from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707935
It's like pagers, fax, checks and chip-less credit cards - Americans take a long time to abandon their legacy tech.
Have a look here:

https://jamie.build/const

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1208369896880558080 (React core team member)

https://twitter.com/littlecalculist/status/91787524189167616... (Ember creator)
Thank you for the suggestion! I also hate the scrolling and this is much better.
A business that doesn't have cash flow for bad times is not a business. There was a time when business weren't leveraged to the max and the profit taking during good times was not squeezed to every cent. This could easily be fixed with regulation to promote this behavior but currently the priority is to take the profits to the owners.
Hi maxwell, what would you recommend to another developer who might be entering the same space with a WebRTC-based product?
> majority of leveraged firms into bankruptcy.

I am unsure how this is different from the normal failure of leveraged firms. When so many are failing within 3 years in normal times, this just seems to be more of the same.
Agreed, this is why after this, whatever the root cause, we should have international "discouragement" on disease research. This stuff is going to leak out. Not saying this one did.
The US absolutely has a hunger problem. I can personally attest to this as I slept hungry numerous nights from age 11 to 16 (until i was on college meals.) School lunch covered breakfast and lunch, but dinner is on you.

If your wages are growing slower than rent/heating/electricity/etc you suddenly have to chip into your hierarchy of needs (as I later found out my parents did)

The problem with programs in the US is often means testing in the US. It is a corrupt system that makes things very difficult for honest people while perpetuating fraud for insiders and friends.

Bureaucrats in NYC (in my case) made it near impossible to get Food Stamps for some time -- then you go to the grocery store and see someone in Nike Air Jordans ($200+ in the 1990s!!!) whip out food stamps. You see people check out with food stamps and go into a BMW in the parking lot. I grew up in South Brooklyn and was constantly infuriated not only at poverty but those who took advantage of systems to combat it -- and corrupt bureaucrats who enabled corrupt users. A lot came down to hidden social clubs of fraudsters.

Obesity is a separate problem. Often the poor don't have access to quality calories, so they fill themselves with the most affordable calories (low priced carbs.) Eating healthy is a luxury.
Canadian living in Canada with a EU citizen on a PR (permanent residency in Canada). Let’s say I get in on a TN, I understand she can accompany me without being allowed to work. How long would it take for her to get a work permit? Months, years?
I came across a reference to Althttpd while reading through some of the Fossil [0] documentation. I'm always amazed at how robust and simple SQLite and its related technologies are.

From the page:

> As of 2018, the althttpd instance for sqlite.org answers about 500,000 HTTP requests per day (about 5 or 6 per second) delivering about 50GB of content per day (about 4.6 megabits/second) on a $40/month Linode. The load average on this machine normally stays around 0.1 or 0.2. About 19% of the HTTP requests are CGI to various Fossil source-code repositories.

[0] http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
My question is how Chrome knows if it's a big impact or not? I assume it's based on metrics sent to google's servers. Can those be disabled?
There has never been a single program administered by the SBA that was not comically broken.

There are two possibilities:

1. This program is going to continue the great tradition of government epic failures of providing help to small businesses

2. This time around it works and small businesses get an immediate ( in a commercial sense of the word ) help in record time.

One won't need to be a genius to figure out the implication of 2. Personally, I think it would be 1.
Face masks for Covid-19: A deep dive into the data
Again, it's very easy to find these papers. There are subreddits where people will post any paper you ask for, also there are IRC channels that will do the same. But for most stuff, you can very easily find it yourself in <1m. I agree that the papers should be free, but in practice, the fact that the papers are not free isn't that big of a deal since they are so easy to get anyways for free.
What I believe mthoms is saying that the "battery management" software was the secret thing, because it was. We all have a basic idea that when your battery is going bad you should replace it, I imagine, but the software fix Apple silently pushed out arguably prolonged battery life at the expense of making the phone run slower. But if the Apple Geniuses weren't told this was happening, they wouldn't be able to say, "Oh, yeah, your phone's turned on battery management because your battery isn't doing well."
I work a regular job and still have the fear of losing an income. For me, the best way to deal with this fear was to focus on generating some uncorrelated income outside of my job.
civ 5 can be different with the right settings: when I played on deity, half of the time it has been a struggle until a few rounds before victory (conquest).
Cool! Thanks for doing the course!
Discussion on hn is higher quality. I'm an almost original slashdot reader, user id is 4 digits. I haven't browsed there in perhaps years at this point.
With this kind of scenario, if you have a 9-5 job, you have a very clear transition to unemployment. If you're a consultant... There is definitely government will and intent to help you, but you're a square peg, and the unemployment offices are still figuring out how to best fit you into a round hole.
Why is that so important? As I said, choosing a specific port is not enough. This is not TLS. An aggressive firewall may drop those TCP connections because there is no TLS data on them.
I don't think you and I know each other, but I'm going to guess that you own shares in hundreds of companies. I'm also guessing that you have never voted at the shareholder meeting of most or all of those companies. Again, just guessing, but I'm guessing that the same is true for most of the people who read this site. And this is YC--all about founders and funders.
Not a substantive comment, but: ahahahaha

Are you one of the people who doesn't know what a gallon of milk costs? Trying to figure out how else you could have come to this conclusion.
I also came across this the other day:

https://candor.co/hiring-freezes

I'm curious as to why the redraw performance for the embedded Airtable is so terrible. Is that normal?
If you adjust the number of homicides per capita, tribal wars are far more destructive that anything more modern (including WW1&2). It's hard to get the right perspective on it, because hunter-gatherer societies are so small, the death toll from warfare isn't just a large and impersonal number, but specific people's stories. So then we compare it to our nameless millions of dead, and proclaim ourselves to be monsters. But:

"Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t: it’s easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to the inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.” Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and contributed to the acceptance of centralized authority as tribal societies grew larger."
You just described exactly what I described, only attaching a malicious connotation to it.

It doesn't have to be malicious; the fact is that the market simply favors usability. Optimizing for the things users care about over the things they don't is the first PM guideline. This has been demonstrated over and over and over again; have users first, then worry about security and privacy.
That's an awesome platform, I'll start implementing it in my startup!

Just a little feedback:

I just signed up, but I don't know if it was a special case; Your sign up flow was broken for me: Filled the basic info in the first page of the signup flow (where you ask for email/password/name) and in the second part (the one of the URL and what we are building) just jumped an error saying that I should retry later. I just clicked again the button and nothing happened. Opened the developer console, inspected the network and I saw the error message: "This user is already signed up".

Ok... Now I'm in the user panel, all good, but please show more information to the user, more if you are trying with a delicate thing like finances.
It's been a somewhat noticeable hit, but they're still doing great overall: https://www.google.com/search?q=zm+stock
The optics of the National Guard (read: men with guns) delivering food for months in the entire United States would trigger a nearly immediate break down of economic ties both internally in the US and between the US and the rest of the world
Interesting that the author understandably hates on C++, mentions Python bindings but then never appears to try them. It is true often cross-language docs are not great, but is pretty easy to convert between the two languages with a few examples.

Also, I'd never heard of the limit of LGPL on static-linking. I have a few pure Python projects under this but don't think the rule applies.
> 99.9% of people don't understand what end-to-end encryption is and why it is needed, because they think their calls are secure, when in fact they aren't. It is actually our responsibility to make end-to-end encryption mainstream and to educate people.

I'm an academic and a long-time Hacker News reader. It seems that the tech community has collectively decided that all internet communication -- of whatever sort -- should be secure, all the time.

My first thought, is an outsider, is that this is unnecessarily anal-retentive. But upon reflection, I'm very grateful for this. The more anal-retentive that developers have to be, the less I have to be. If HN is so up in arms about this, it's a very good sign for Internet security overall.

What is it that you'd educate me about? That someone could have snooped in on my departmental meeting? Before Covid-19, these meetings were held in in an open room, in an unlocked building where people walk in and out all day. Anyone with the desire to snoop would have had no difficulty.

From what I understand, enough pressure is being placed on Zoom that they are cleaning up their act. From where I sit as an outsider, the system seems to mostly be working. I'm not angry at Zoom, but I'm very happy that others are.
you can tweak the settings to higher maintenance and higher interest rates. but yes, even then, it becomes too easy after a while. would be nice if the settings allowed it to make it even harder (extra high maintenance costs, 6% interest rates, etc)
Sometimes the same hole is reused, though not usually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_Site
> A business that doesn't have cash flow for bad times is not a business. There was a time when business weren't leveraged to the max and the profit taking during good times was not squeezed to every cent. This could easily be fixed with regulation to promote this behavior but currently the priority is to take the profits to the owners.

This may be what we read about publicly traded firms, but small businesses are in a completely different category. For example, many of them, if they do not take loans to improve their offering, will lose customers to the competition.
Yeah, that's fair, I've been bitten by "not actually immutable" bugs before (works well enough for primitives, but not objects or arrays, which is most things in JS-land!). Libraries like Immutable.js can help bridge the gap.

> they try to solve a bad design (`var`) but they introduce another bad design (`const`)

`let` is intended to be the actual `var` replacement, and it's okay for that. I think there's an argument that `const` is a bad design, in the sense that it's deceptive, under the not-that-uncommon case you describe. Still, I'd rather have it than not, and I personally still like defaulting to `const` and opting-in to `let` in the (rarer and rarer) event that it's needed. (I'm also on 100% TypeScript at this point, which doesn't remove the potential for problems, but does provide an extra layer of guard rails in general.)
Ahh yes, the higher standards of HN, such as this post you have made in response to mine. Really powerful critique.
Russians used to use nukes to seal leaking gas wells
"It worked quite well, but I can't really see the meaning on running two [RISC] OSes."

Updates?

For many years I do an update dance with NetBSD kernels. Two kernels with embedded filesystems on same bootable media, one updated, one not. Select kernel at boot, download appropriate userland to RAM disk then chroot. Download new kernel source, compile, repeat.
The majority of COVID-19 patients who need a ventilator are going to die regardless of whether they actually get a ventilator or not. Hopefully that will change as more effective treatments are developed, but that's the current reality. By all means let's do whatever it takes to deploy more ventilators, but they're not a panacea.
So Nike is not a business? Cheesecake Factory is not a business? TJMAXX is not a business?
You're right. The degree of uncertainty is still too high, we don't even have a figure on the percentage of asymptomatic cases. Lockdown/quarantine measures right now seem in line with the old saying "hope for the best, prepare for the worst".

The evolution of this disease over the course of the next months will tell us who's right and who's wrong on these varying estimates.
I agree. As an employee, you assume some of the same downside as the business owner, and little of the upside. If the business fails, you are out of a job. If the business does well, you might get a small raise.
The most valuable skills to learn in lockdown and how long it takes
I use Safari too, but I know what it used to be. That's what saddens me. It's still convenient, but the bugs in Mobile Safari of late are just... unacceptable. Particularly there is a bug, acknowledged by many others now, over many iOS versions, where the zoom freaks out in Mobile Safari and the renderer just seems to give up or something. How is that regression even possible? Ah, man. Everything goes to crap after a while, huh.
Haha, money printer go brrr

https://brrr.money
Plenty of companies seem fine with storing all their communications on Slack's servers, storing all their IP on Github's servers, storing all their data in Office 365, all their confidential email in GSuite etc. Why is Zoom so different? There is some subset of organisations for which none of these things are acceptable of course.
This is the (horrible) idea that just won’t die.

What do you propose that the parties who are due rent/mortgage payments do? Those payments aren’t simply ‘return on capital’ they pay taxes, utilities, insurance, employees.
Krakow team invents coronavirus-fighting substance