skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two examples of many, to illustrate there's more to it than playing Malcom Gladwell with the price points:

==

1. A software company that most people here would recognize (and many use) asked me to find out why corporate/enterprise users weren't upgrading from the free and low-cost plans to the upper tiers. After extensive research and customer interviews, I identified five main benefits their enterprise users were getting from the platform.

The twist: Four of those five benefits were available on the free plan. And the "premium" features on the top plans were of no use to them. No wonder they weren't upgrading.

Soon after, the company overhauled their pricing plans to capture more value ($$) from the benefits they provide.

This was a major breakthrough for them and led to fantastic outcomes.

===

2. Another software startup, smaller than the one above but still recognizable by a good fraction of HNers, was losing potential customers because their pricing tiers were based on # of servers. Because 1) EC2 and Docker were becoming a thing at the time, so pinning the price to "number of servers" resulted in some absurdly high quotes for not-so-large teams, and 2) the legacy/incumbent providers pinned their pricing to data volumes, so the people who wanted to switch found it hard to compare pricing and see that this company's plans were a better value.

We changed the pricing to be based on data volume and designed the tiers to be a bit lower than the big incumbents and to not encourage current customers to downgrade.

===

And sure, while this was all going on there were designers and product marketers busying themselves with optimizing the pricing pages for conversions. However, a good outcome for them would be a 5–10% increase in signups, whereas the outcomes from the two examples above were measured in seven-figure increases in ARR and VC rounds.
DataGrip is quickly becoming unusable to me due to it’s inability to show me a tables/field encoding.

I really have no clue how anyone thought that was an unnecessary feature.
Sure, everyone cut your lifestyle in half and let's re-build this great nation, save the planet, the whales, penguins and colonize Mars by tightening our belts for the next 100 years.

Sounds good? No? Alright then. Good talk.
> And by the way they actually explicit mention it on the homepage - it says .NET 4.8 right under the download button.

True, that. Except who keeps track of which version of .NET works with what? I for one don't.

Years ago, I used to use TablePlus on my Win 7 box but eventually canned it for better (IMO) alternatives. So when TablePlus recently reappeared on HN, I decided to give it another tryout.

Not one to keep track of .NET compatibility, I simply clicked their "Download for Windows" button, and ran their setup program, which eventually prompted for me to download/install .NET 4.8, as if everything was okay so far...

All this extraneous effort could easily have been avoided simply by:

a) s/Download for Windows/Download for Windows 10/

b) Browser OS sniffing-->Sorry, you're using an unsupported OS

c) Their install program could have announced straight away-->Sorry, you're using an unsupported OS
It's fine to make a substantive objection, such as by pointing out which governments handled it well. But please don't toss nationalistic flamebait into HN threads. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, and those are nasty, boring, and dumb.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Many Asian countries have recent experience with SARS, which led them to get their pandemic game together in advance of this one.
In your expert opinion on US health insurance, what number of pages would represent due diligence for federal and state review?
> It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.

Sure, but is this actually a high order blocker? I'd argue that it's not even a first order effect. The problem here is not that we don't have enough insurance capacity; the problem is that we don't have enough ventilators. And it turns out, actually building those things to spec is hard. Intellectual property and regulatory capture are bad things to be reduced, IMO, but they're only part of our current equation.

The moneyed classes of America don't like redundancy and they don't like long term investments. Since they hold such a huge chunk of wealth compared to the rest of America, their preferences (which I might note, Marc represents professionally) make these decisions long before patent troll lawsuits or building inspectors can rain on any parade.

> Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.

Litigation is the most costly way to settle these things. Your idea would require even more startup capital per small business to overcome the legal obstacles you seemed eager to abolish.
Minor nit:

> Tax individual income at a higher rate.

We should instead move the tax burden to land, since holding land is completely unproductive, and as opposed to working for an income, which is productive.
A single outcome in over a single point in time, you mean. It doesn’t address the structural issues, such as cost and availability of healthy foods, that contribute to the need to lose weight in the first place.
Not really, no. The Coranic prescriptions have been relatively unchanged since a thousand years. Given the combination of textual and oral traditions, and the low divergence of historic Qurans over a wide area, we can conclude that the Quran did not significantly change.

The Coranic prescriptions about usury and other economic activities are incredibly clearly written.

The only conclusion is that there is no reason to believe that it was in any way different to today, and a lot of reasons to believe the restrictions on free trade are even higher than in the modern Islamic world.
The difference is that with coroutines, yielding is explicit. Tight-looping will hog the CPU, and a blocking call will block other coroutines too. Typically "green threads" are semantically just threads but cheaper. They're scheduled independently, so there's no risk of them hogging the CPU, and you can use synchronous apis. The one downside is that you need explicit synchronization between them, whereas with coroutines you can mutate shared data structures and not worry about race conditions as long as you don't yield in between.
My first reaction was, "How do you make a game using an email client?"
That's absolutely a separate problem worth being mad about, but that doesn't change the cpu throttling thing being afaic a perfectly sane power management feature.

I'm surprised to be defending Apple on this, normally most things they do seem pretty anti consumer and leave a bad taste in my mouth. But in this specific case I really don't think they deserve the scorn.
Wasn't there an investigation that found no evidence on that?
Sqlectron [1] is a great open-source GUI SQL client that allows you to see what you're doing in real-time, which helps massively with practising.

You can also use it to validate what you've done using other tools. E.g. if you write some PHP or Python to interact with a database, you can open it in Sqlectron to double-check for yourself that it worked correctly.

[1] https://sqlectron.github.io/
In my view, if you're charging $20 for a utility that demonstrably saves companies hundreds of hours of labor, then you're leaving a whole lot of money on the table.
Knife Money
Now seems like the perfect time to repair infrastructure -- bridges and roads, etc -- while people aren't driving on them.
There are nightly builds, including in Homebrew. They're not perfect but the only bug I've run into is filtering the query history.
Was, about 15 years ago.
Remove vocals from music with machine learning
Yeah, I think people who believe that pulling over is an easy solution may not have been in one of these situations. It can come up quickly and there may be no exit for miles. Pull over into what? The snow bank on the side of the road? Now you are a hazard for everyone else coming along behind you. Sometimes you just have to make it work as best you can until the circumstances change.
The republican stronghold of Texas has one of the lowest covid deaths per capita in the United States, better than even California (which is doing relatively well). Deaths per capita at 16/million is lower than almost anywhere in Western Europe.

It's not obvious to me at all you can make a political judgement from covid19.
The Intelligent Investor Book Review
Last commit to master was 7 months ago. Judging by the pull request activity I'd say it's ripe for a community fork.
Would you say the same when talking about drug addiction, rather than just weight gain? Would it matter to drug addiction rates, if there were cheap Fast Drug stores all across the country, akin to fast food stores?

I think it's quite clear that here it makes zero sense to just say 'try to resist taking these ubiquitous drugs which give short-term satisfaction' as a policy measure. You'd need to treat it as a public health issue in which human beings not rational robots, but instead pleasure-seekers who would be helped by e.g. a sugar tax, policies that restricted the number of fast food stores to a minimum concentration level, healthy-food subsidies, public health and information campaigns, public cycling infrastructure, rules to enable workers to engage in sports at their workplace blablabla.

Apparently willpower is not enough and there are lots of policy instruments we could employ.
But it’s just a case of how bad: really bad, or really really bad. When a basketball team can get tests, but ordinary citizens can’t, that is not a healthcare system, it’s a wealthcare system.
odd golang has a better security story than npm, rubygems, and python. it'll at least crypto ensures the dependency code hasnt been modified since you first retrieved it iirc.

the rest is up to you as a developer to ensure its safe.
Yep, Germany's Healthcare system is a good model - Mandated Govt insurance with optional Private Insurance.

Uptake is about 75% on the private side, 25% stick with the Govt model.

You could drag Obamacare there with the right political will but breaking Company based healthcare apart is a tough political cookie.
Which modern languages are you thinking about? There's still a long list of stuff in research languages that are not common in industry but are slowly making their way in (think how long algebraic data types and first class functions took to become mainstream, and lots of concurrency stuff that's still being rediscovered), and there's new areas being explored (dependent types, how to do monad transformers gracefully). I would be very sad if we stopped with what we have now.
Pharmacist Arrested in Plot to Firebomb a Rival to Sell More on the Dark Web
Thanks for the Buckminster Fuller reference! Such an underrated thinker.

I hate being overly cynical, but I think that there is a simple answer that can be found by looking at who’s incentivized to not make these systemic changes.

To take that further, there’s a subset of that group that is incentivized to actively prevent such systemic change.

It just so happens that those 2 groups wield the most authority, power, and influence.

So, that leaves me with a view that some may call ‘dystopian’, but I consider ‘hopeful’:

Only a massive revolution can change this system.
Yeah, it does seem like maybe there could be improvements on the filesystem/RAID software side to better support these drives. If only they were labelled properly as SMR so that the filesystem devs could buy one to test with.
If some machine takes your money and produces 98% war and 2% science, maybe - just maybe - the only true solution to fund more science is not to put more money into said machine, but change configuration first.
Well for one thing, it needs to defend Tor against many parties, some of them with essentially unlimited resources, who are working full-time to find holes to exploit.
> Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff

That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.

Where did the foundational ingredients for each of those things come from? Computers, networks, video compression, touchscreens, materials, ... heck, even pagerank, and a large fraction of the breakthroughs in ML/AI (till very recently) have come from academia -- through publicly funded research. Companies are very good at solving the "last mile" to apply technologies towards making products, but don't typically have the vision or the wherewithal to pursue deeper innovations.
It is all about our congress selling out the American people, every year for 50 years. It is a supply chain of THEFT of the full citizen base, by corporations and the wealthy.

The American people must stand up and force it to stop.
Attaching a cryptocurrency to Sia allows us to draw a distinction between producers and consumers.

In typical p2p networks, you are expected to be both in roughly equal proportions, which means your network gets polluted by a lot of low-quality users who are just trying to do their part.

Sia has the consumers pay the producers, and has a marketplace mechanism that selects the highest performing producers to perform the jobs and receive the revenue.

This allows the network as a whole to be much, much more efficient.
Side-projects as a Confidence Hack
Windows 7 is still widely deployed in western markets which TablePlus appears geared toward. So it's a reasonable call-out IMO.
The debate as played out within a company may be more about power assertion, but the debate in the wider community and on the internet seem fairly rational.

I do worry that if the idea that it's all about power-seeking gains acceptance that we will throw up our hands in the air and say it doesn't matter either way (because of an unconscious fear of being seen as a simple power asserter) about things that do matter and that we stop trying to improve things.
As someone who lost 60lbs eating subway and Taco Bell for 8 months I don’t agree with this whatsoever.

If we are talking about weight loss (which we are) “healthy” foods are not a requirement, a calorie deficit is.
I'm in favor of building things.

But we build in response to demand. Once people need more of something (e.g. PPE), production ramps up. That effect has been in place and has worked quite well for thousands of years. It doesn't require any policy or government, or even a new social movement, it's just an emergent property of humans being free.

You might argue that we could be smarter, and that we should build excess PPE before the demand hits just in case. This is reasonable to an extent, but probably to less of an extent than you think. The problem is that there are dozens of possible scenarios we should prepare for, and we can't know ahead of time which one is going to strike next. We have to prepare for them all: nuclear bunkers, asteroid deflection, global warming mitigation, sea walls, military capacity, etc, etc. Giving the competition among possible future disasters, it is often wiser to KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY (in capitals, because that is my main point) so you can respond to any of them after they eventuate, not before. This requires that we have the capacity to ramp up production quickly. That's not always a given, so I'm in favor of governmental action to ensure we have "stragetic capacity" to ramp up anything we might desperately need. But I'm not in favor of just building lots of things that we might need.
"we're definetly at least 15+ years out". Similar statements were made about Go the year it was solved. AV is a vastly harder problem and requires new techniques to get there, but AI can progress can happen any time.
Yes, you wouldn't do all work in the task queue - commonly, we make some change in the database which can happen pretty fast, and after that transaction commits, we might defer a task that sends a notification, email, whatever.
Work and hard work.

We all know it's easy to "work" as in get "stuff done" but "hard work" is the basis of our economy. Part of the problem is the notion of hardness, a dimensionless constant on the Moh scale which you can look up elsewhere. Difficulty, as in the complexity of thought required to predict a system, is another matter altogether. We should speak instead of power, the ability to perform work quickly.

I know a few powerful thinkers. Give them a problem and they'll return an appreciation quickly. An answer will follow, and more thereafter, until things settle, and they can share their understanding.

One of the most useful techniques in this regard is contextualisation, whereby we physically, perhaps synesthaestically, abstract ourselves from our abstractions by being with, and learning from, each other. Think of children and think of Alan Kay.

Children put in all their time to being children. When we're employed we're employed as adults. Eight hours of work is equivalent to eight hours of cooking and cleaning, or playing and teaching, of exploring and learning. When we pay each other to be adults we maintain all the rest of society.

Paid by hour or minute we're best off working as autonomous heroes for the greater good.

I love hacker news, smart people share politely. I can show my Mother on occasion. But Hacker News is still just a bit of a cuter slashdot with pretentions of lambdatheultimate and a healthy dash of shtetloptimised, downed with a bit of whatever you're having yourself.
You can always find a crazy example of something or other and choose to blow it out of proportion, while ignoring positive developments on the ground. Blood and gore sell newspaper subscriptions. In the meanwhile I'm glad Trump ignored the political damage Cuomo was inflicting, and did not send the entire stock of vents to NY. Doing so would be utterly disastrous to other hotspots.
For your first question: technically yes, but it's not really the way it's meant to be done. If you want to pin something with storage, you can become a host on the Sia network and then make that content available through your host. But this also means the content is subject to going offline if you go offline (unless someone has re-pinned it to other hosts), and Skynet is really meant to be this high reliability platform where you don't need to worry about particular users going offline.

If you want to download skynet files using the command line, you can run 'siad' in portal mode as a daemon, and then use 'siac' to query the daemon. 'siac skynet download [skylink] [destination]' is the command to perform the download.

Doing it this way means you gain direct decentralized access to Skynet instead of needing to funnel through a portal.
Why is any traffic moving in conditions this bad? Just stop.
They're probably not even detecting the lane markings or road surfaces as they're baked into the HD map.
Thanks. Has anyone by any chance benchmarked hypertrie against u/marknadal's [0] gun.js?

Speaking of which, the gun.js network hosts the internet-archive (archive.org) [1] which is likely to be bigger than the English Wikipedia (?). Cloudflare runs an IPFS gateway. Are there organizations of similar size dat is looking to onboard or has onboard-ed?

---

A few questions:

1a. Re: hole-punching: Do you support clients on LTE (or, networks behind CG-NAT)? Is hole-punching just for the DHT connections (which seems to operate over UDP4) or for Feed (hypercore) connections, too (which default to TCP?).

1b. Are there plans to use WebRTC (like WebTorrent) instead of TCP or UDP sockets?

1c. In case of TURN relays, how long do you intend to support traffic through your servers? It might get cost-prohibitive at some point. Are (will) TURN relays (be) deployed worldwide to combat latencies?

2. Are hyperswarm and hyperdrive different example usages for hypercore or are they complementary? If so, how are those projects related, as in, is hyperdrive built on top of hyperswarm?

3. The project is spread across disparate GitHub accounts-- Some top-level packages in mafintosh's account and some in hyperswarm's, for instance. Is this intentional?

4. I saw references to merkle-trees, flat-trees, kademlia, HAMT, bitfields... is there a documentation on why these data structures are used? I can guess kademlia is for the DHT and merkle-trees for some form of entropy management. Are such implementation details documented (looking for something similar to gun.js [2] or redis [3] docs)?

5a. Can you please point out a few major differences to gun.js and ProtocolLab's IPFS?

5b. Conversely, what are some use-cases for which dat really outshines other such protocols?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15818856

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682

[2] https://gun.eco/docs/RAD

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396
You could make a claim about the internet which would be reasonable but that is also a miniscule portion of what the federal government has done with our money so using a teeny tiny example is more of an exception that proves the rule type of thing. The amount we spend on the Federal government and what we get back for it is crazy bad. The problem is NOT the federal government having too little money. It's a huge proportion of GDP, especially compared to when our government was vastly more effective. The problem is that the institutions that make up our government are dramatically incompetent and squander the massive amounts of funding we give it.

> That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.

Definitionally, if private investors made money, so did the taxpayers:

1) The investors are taxpayers who benefitted.

2) The investors returns were taxed and all future economic activity that came from it was taxed.

3) Societally we got the "digital libraries".
Thanks for that. I'm not worried as much as I am disappointed at the state of recruiting in the valley, and the general state of being in these times. Maybe people show their worst sides in the worst of times.
I mean its a db client, its not rocket science.
While your bank may have screwed up, it's also possible that you were further down the list than you know. And while it sucks if your bank prioritized other people ahead of you, it might be that they had valid reasons, even if it hurt you. Another possibility is that the larger banks were able to process applications faster and they got their loan money first so you bank just didn't have the funds for more than a few people.

Now if you want to complain, how about complaining to your congress person and asking them why the sba isn't getting more funds. Presumably, if it looks like the program will get more money, it might be worth asking your bank how far down the list you are, so you'll know if you make it in the next round. And it will suck to lay people off on Monday, but if you have a good feel for when the program will get more money, and when you might expect it, maybe you might be able to get your employees back sooner.
Ask HN: It's Time to Build
They are concepts you'd build often with a deep level of thought.

You should publish high fidelity ideas that keep you up at night.

Make a list of "n" things you'd do if qualifications and time and history and salary were no object.