skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes I agree... but let me add some color to me personally.

Me = small business owner. Revenue less than 2mm per year.

Major public company clients moved payments to net 60 and net 90 from net 30

2 clients emailed April 1st (emailed) effective immediately no contractors or agencies effective immediately.

1 major retailer we have done WiFi access point metrics for all stores in North America (roughly 4k stores) had an invoice bounce back to me. After researching I find on LinkedIn my stakeholder is no longer with the company. I push hard to get someone in AP to reply and finally I hear they stopped the entire program and didn’t think to tell us. 11 years of providing this monthly data analysis and collecting roughly a billion data points a month... gone. Without a heads up.

2 new prospective projects set to kickoff April May moved to June July.

PPP covers last years salaries. We have sizable raises to key staff (project managers in January) . 60% of my workforce if outside of the US and can’t be covered under current monetary relief. I’ve not taken a check now in almost 2 months.

Entire line of business (WordPress) is now zero.

So yes stress is in relative forms. for me it’s confining, silent, and endless.

For me I’ve been running this company for 21 years now (started in college). I’ve hit a couple of near breaking points (08 and now). And it’s an unbelievable amount of stress. I sympathize, empathize and understand what people are going through.

What gets me through this is the following:

- The time I’ve gotten to spend with my family, my kids is absolutely amazing and I will treasure it forever
- I love my team and I’ll do what I can to keep them employed and without disruption
- Even with the stress and uncertainty I still love my job and what I’ve built

On the business side:
- As a service business I now fully and completely understand that I need to figure out how to make a more resilient business that can weather business interruption to this degree and scale. It’s easy to blame covid but it’s inevitably my job to have considered this and prepared for it. This is everything from specific contract language changes to planning cash flow for a 40-60% reduction in business for maybe 6 months.

Anyway, I thought I’d share, maybe someone finds solace in knowing they aren’t alone and that they don’t need validation for how they feel.

Hang in there everyone!
This should not be the case for a library developer. If you accept the consequences for your app, that's fine, but you shouldn't be expected to accept the consequences of a library developer being careless.
Due to lack of supply, a lot of such folks are in on the joke.
You sound a lot like a person who’s never been evicted.
The set of single line changes I'd be comfortable making with full IDE support is much larger than the set of one line changes I'd be comfortable making in a text box.
So... you propose just staying on lockdown indefinitely until "adequate testing is in place?" And when will that be? It could be 6 months from now or more so long as the Trump administration is running things.

Lockdown isn't "free" like you seem to think. It has a very heavy cost. And some day (if not already), that cost will outweigh the lives saved from doing it in the first place. Because the combined suicides/mental health/homelessness/domestic violence/etc. increases from lockdown will be greater than [people at risk of covid-19] deaths.

Plus, if lockdowns are keeping hospitals empty, social distancing and masks without the lockdown part would allow us to utilize them more (without them going over capacity).
Steve Ballmer wants to save sports by reinventing the way we watch them
You pay for cross-AZ Traffic in AWS, and that adds up really fast.
Blub paradox applied to taste is even harder to deal with because people without it want to believe it doesn't exist. Programmers can eventually move along the spectrum.
When you have finished doing konmarie externally, begin doing it internally.
>It doesn't add to the story, but somehow people feel compelled to advertise the service they use

People think of virtual sites and services similarly to how they think of physical places. This link has been identified during the web's infancy: you don't download documents online. You navigate and visit a site. Those words are used for both physical and virtual activities. You "go somewhere".

The site or service conveys details about the nature of the activity too. Watching movies on Netflix may paint a mental picture of adults relaxing while watching a relatively mature show. Watching movies on Disney Plus might imply that the adults were spending time with their kids or whatever. Same to real life locations again, you might tell people that you went for a drive down the beach rather than a drive through the city. These simple details can help say a lot about the nature of the drive.
Browsers never displayed such a pop-up for cookies by default. You had to tweak settings, just as you do today (in today’s world it might require a browser extension, I don’t know).
They might have intended that, but I still don't see the status in being able to afford a $400 phone. The vast majority of Americans can afford that, and obviously do based on how many iPhones I see. The cashier at target uses an iPhone, the lawyers I see use iPhone, the programmers use iPhones, the housekeepers who don't speak English at a hotel I see use iPhones. What is the status?

To me, the blue bubble means it's not using inferior MMS protocols which may or may not get the message to the recipient. I prefer using iMessage/Signal/Whatsapp.
If the rule was applied literally and strictly, that would be even better.

Is consent given by agreeing to a huge banner that pops up anew every time you load the page?

Fine, you can do that, but then you have to pop up a huge "withdraw consent" banner every time a user that gave consent visits your site. Which you probably don't want, so you can't do the obnoxious opt-in banner either.

In practice, that would make any obnoxious way to ask for consent untenable, because you couldn't use it to annoy users into consenting (and staying in consenting state).
"And there's no reason for customers to opt-in when you're not allowed to offer anything in exchange." is kind of the point - the goal of GDPR is to stop the unwanted invasions of privacy, not extract some additional compensation from companies in exchange for being permitted to continue all these things. It's designed so that it would not be possible for a standard privacy-violating website to become GDPR compliant by writing some legalese or showing some popups or offering some discounts in exchange, the only way for the industry to become compliant should be by actual change in behavior so that there's much less tracking and violating the user's privacy.

The valid reasons for customers to opt-in are in scenarios where they desire the result to be customised according to that private data - where the customer wants you to use that data because that actual use benefits them. E.g. a dating site user might want you to use all kinds of private data for the purposes of finding better date matches. And the same user might not want you to use that same data for any other purposes or share it with third parties. And the intended result of GDPR (as the enforcement slowly changes the common practices) is a world where these user's privacy preferences are actually respected.

So the consent question comes down to essentially "are the users gifting you this data because they want you to have it?" - if so, knock yourself out, everyone's happy. But any selling or trading that consent is not binding or enforceable.

The most effective analogy that I can think of is sexual consent.

Like, if I sign a contract saying "You can fuck my arse and I get 5 euros for that" then that by itself does not count as valid consent, that's a nonenforceable term, it's null and void. At every future point I'm free to not have my arse fucked unless I really want to (or there's some other legal basis, IDK, a warrant for a cavity search), that's an unalienable right, it's not something that I can sign away in a contract, and doing so without my actual consent would be rape no matter what I signed in the contract.

In the exact same manner, under GDPR if I sign a contract saying "You can violate my privacy and I get 5 euros for that" then that by itself does not count as valid consent, that's a nonenforceable term, it's null and void. At every future point I'm free to not have my privacy violated unless I want to (or there's some other legal basis), that's an unalienable right, it's not something that I can sign away in a contract, and doing so without my actual consent would be a privacy rights violation despite the contract.
You can archive (2) with VS Code by having a development container defined in .devcontainer/devcontainer.json + .devcontainer/Dockerfile + Remote-Containers plugin.

I've been doing that in my company and it's awesome to have a reproducible environment for each project.
I posted because I think my post would be useful to other people who are considering alternatives to GitHub but also like rich PR workflows like GitHub has, and because I think it's good to encourage would-be GitHub alternatives to invest in that area.

I've actually been following Sourcehut's mailing list and updates since forever because I find their philosophies interesting, but not right or practical for my own workflow.
My blog is decently high-traffic and has been static/Pelican for several years.

After using Disqus for a while I decided to drop comments entirely because they're more trouble than they're worth. A quick write up about it -- https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments...

TL;DR: don't.
Not even Microsoft brags about their 30 years of bloated software, and their idea of mending their past mistakes is xkcd.com/927 every time. Microsoft maintains archaic software because it still means profit for them, not because of the developer experience. Realistically speaking no one wants to use or maintain — let alone brag about using or maintaining win95 software unless you have a serious case of stockholm syndrome. PS. Do you want to install updates? XP SP2 is ready to install.
The hospitals here in Canada stopped doing "non-essential" surgeries by government policy. This is a judgement call that is not always correct [0]

[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/he-never-got-a-cha...
> We do not have time to explain public key cryptography right now, but this is basically the encryption key we’re going to use to talk secretly.

If there's one misunderstanding that it'd be valuable to clean up about protocols like TLS in 2020 this would be it.

It is technically possible to do this. It's how PGP worked for example, and it was how SSL was originally conceived, but it is not now commonly used and is unsupported entirely in TLS 1.3

Let's take my connection to send this message to Hacker News. It's not TLS 1.3, but the previous version TLS 1.2 instead, and it has a 2048-bit RSA public key in the certificate. Is this key used "to talk secretly" ? No!

Instead my browser and HN's server use a variant of the Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman protocol with Elliptic Curves to pick a completely random key and that key is used "to talk secretly". The public RSA key's role is only to prove that I am communicating with Hacker News and not somebody else pretending to be them. That's all it is for on modern sites talking to modern browsers.

This is what Forward Secrecy is all about. Since the keys used to secure messages were not based on that fixed long term RSA key, but instead a random key both parties soon forgot about, we achieve Forward Secrecy as neither of us can (whether by mistake or on purpose) later reveal how to decrypt the messages.
Never change, HN
Perhaps delegating authority to issue immigrant work visas to counties in such cases. Get skilled staff from overseas. Sure, there are ways it could be done badly and go wrong, but it could be done right.
You write this as if it's unrealistic. Who spends half an hour or more every month managing each tiny server? The closest server to me right now has probably taken about that long in the past year, swapping out a failed drive that unfortunately wasn't in a hot-swap bay. And it's much more powerful than a $35/month cloud instance.
Hm my whatsapp crashed midcall today, wonder if they use the Facebook SDK or something else
I can't help but wonder how Facebook would react if someone created a bot trained off discussions on Facebook.
Lets skip the hyperbole, appeals to authority and platitudes. This crash is from handwritten API response wrapping code that lacks checks. This is string-based programming. This is utter shit.
"BunnyCDN also provides way to block users from the EU" -- and many cdns anonymize log info so that it does not trigger gdpr
Death rate is the proxy for cases. What matters when attempting to contain the disease is prevalence of the disease.
Becoming a massively profitable megacorp isn't the only winning formula.

Were Linkedin, Instagram, Beats by Dre, WhatsApp, Tableau, Skype, GitHub, MuleSoft all failures because they were acquired for billions, making lucrative paydays for their founders and investors?
Hospitals were overwhelmed in many places in the world. People absolutely should have stayed home.

Or are you trying to claim that the virus is a hoax or something? This is a real risk. We've seen what happens in Madrid and Milan if you lock down just ~10 days too late.
Ask HN: Should I add director on my resume
I was a Director in my last role and now I moved to a SW3 (just under senior in my org).

I am about to become 29 years old..and I feel like people think it's a joke that I was a director of SWE a year ago when I'm a lowly SW3 now.

Should I still put it on my resume? I feel like people tend to toss it out because it looks either pretentious or like a lie.
It's early days, but I suspect suicides will approach actual COVID-19 deaths in the end, at least in places and cultures where suicide is "acceptable". Even the most stable will have trouble with financial ruin and watching their children go hungry, and most of the newly jobless are not that stable.
So let me get this straight, the elevator pitch for this is:

"We're going to make a micro-brain out of dick skin and spider webs so we can give it herpes and see if it gets Alzheimers."

Just wanted to make sure.
Ancient North Eurasians
Pretty much anything heavier than hydrogen and helium is a "metal" in astronomy. They work with a lot of strange things so I guess they should have the freedom to use strange naming conventions.
UK state pension is quite small, max ~£175/week.

The "triple lock" just means it's being increased annually by 2.5%, CPI or average earnings growth, whatever is highest. There is talk about scrapping the triple lock - but it doesn't have a huge impact - difference in cost is 1% of GDP by 2060.

It will be a difficult balancing act for the next couple of years, trying to bring the economy back, keep employment up and figure out how to pay for the increased borrowing as a result of the pandemic. I think large scale debt relief will be the only way out of this.
Tracking has a giant cost to society, the sole reason it exists is so we can be manipulated by advertisers into spending more than we otherwise would have.
Here's a reference you may find useful

John A De Goes - A Glossary of Functional Programming

http://degoes.net/articles/fp-glossary
Well, do you have research on how many excess deaths there would be if states started opening up now? California is taking a cautious approach by only opening in stages after cases have stabilized, and only after testing is present. Do you have a better plan than what a group of public health experts have come up with?
The hospitals largely shut down elective surgeries, tried to get rehab patients to other facilities to free up surge capacity, etc.

So, generally, they're less busy than normal.

The problem with opening back up is, we've already seen the growth curve, and that was 2 months ago.

What happens when you multiple that same growth rate against a much higher baseline number of infected people?
> we will continue to invest heavily in VS Code

Just like MS heavily invest in Atom now? :)
Where's the source of "excess mortality is way up"? I didn't see it in the article, though it does suggest there may be fewer heart attacks and strokes because of "a decrease in air pollution and fewer high-fat restaurant meals".
That’s not a slip up on their end, it’s a feature to enable them to collect stuff even if you don’t use their code.
UK publishes weekly statistics of total deaths, including those mentioning covid on the death certificate and the number of excess deaths above the 5 year average for that week. The figures are a few weeks behind though.

This gives a number of covid deaths at 40-80k, and thus an infection of 3-15 million depending on the actual fatality rate.

That means letting it run free, assuming immunity once you have it, and a 65% herd immunity level, would mean at least another 100k deaths and possibly as high as 1 million. Most likely 250k more. There is no appetite in the UK currently for that.
A Post-Pandemic Reality Check for Transit Boosters
It's even more amazing how regulators have been tolerating such blatant abuses instead of just grabbing the Alexa Top 1000, filtering for sites in their jurisdiction, and then going top-to-bottom slapping every violator with a fine.

Start from the top of the list every month, and slap any continued violator with 10x the previous fine. Go as far as time allows within the month.

I bet by the start of month 3, 90% of the sites would be compliant instead of 99% of them blatantly violating the rules.
Good catch, I meant dap.
My anecdata confirms your view exactly. My wife was concerned a few weeks ago that she might have a heart attack (she did not). I suggested to go to urgent care, but she was more concerned about COVID and wanted to just take Aspirin and monitor the situation. She also is in a group vulnerable to COVID, so this might be skewed.

Government closure had nothing to do with this decision. In fact I've zero trust in US government recommendation around this and don't factor their recommendation into any of my personnel decision making around this topic.
I'm just using Firebase + React, but it could've as easily been done in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS or jQuery. I built it in React partly just as practice. Firebase is great though because it provides free hosting and allows me to do analytics (although I haven't done much of that yet).
"Air pollution, of which whose small particulate matter are the most toxic, contributes to about one-third of the global burden of stroke."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003537871...

"In 2004, the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement concluding that exposure to air pollution contributes to cardiovascular illness and mortality. A 2010 update elaborated on those risks.

Short-term exposure can increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, arrhythmias and heart failure in susceptible people, such as the elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions, according to the statement."

https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/consumer-healthcare/w...
Not likely. FB has made it too easy, and developers are lazy. For the marketing/sales/PR types of the company that made the app, the info the SDK returns is exactly the type of information they want/need. At the end of the day, the "morality" of a developer will always come second to the sales/marketing/PR people. After all, you're just a developer, and there's a line a mile long of people waiting to replace you.
Anecdotally, around my town the lower number of drivers on the road seems to be causing those who remain to feel like traffic laws don't matter. I can't even count how many times I have seen blatant "it's red but there's no traffic so I'll just go" behaviors, along with ridiculous speeding and lane changing. Doesn't help that the police essentially announced that they won't be looking for crime anymore.
In germany it's a pretty common think for universities to have some servers for themself.

1. Their use case is kinda different. The servers mostly run heavy CS research related stuff. E.g. they might have heavy CPU load and heavy traffic between they servers but they have less often heavy traffic to the "normal internet" (if they have heavy traffic to the outside it's normally to other research institutes which not seldom have dedicated wire connections).

2. They might run target specific optimized CPU or GPU heavy compute tasks going on for weeks at a time. This is really expansive in the cloud which is mostly focused in thinks like web services.

3. When they don't run such tasks in the research groups they want to allow their juniors to run their research tasks "for free". Which wouldn't work with a payment model as done in the cloud.

4. They don't want to relay on some external company.

Also I'm not sure are there even (affordable) cloud systems with compatible spec? (like with 4+TB of RAM, I'm not kidding this is a requirement for some kind of tasks or they will take way to long and requires additional complexity by using special data structures which support partial offline data in the right way, which can be very costly in dev time)??
We are software development company. Most of our compute/storage needs are for build/test cycles. We recently bought ~100K worth of additional hardware to migrate some of that work off AWS.
The storage / virtualization is done using Ceph & OpenNebula. Including colocation/electricity/networking costs, the investment will pay for itself in ~9 months.
If I would include deployment costs & work to migrate the jobs off the AWS -- it will pay for itself in 11 months.
Yes, requiring the SDK to implement Facebook Login is the decision that's being criticized. Facebook encourages SDK usage obviously for the data collection it enables, but even they provide an OAuth-only login flow that doesn't require the SDK at all: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/manually...
Regarding the shift in CapEx to OpEx, on-prem servers can also be leased, keeping their costs in OpEx.
Well then I'll add:

Calling Functor "Mappable" and Monad "Thenable" doesn't really add much to understanding.

The best advice I ever got was that a Functor is `f` with a function `fmap :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f b` that follows its laws. Same goes for Monad. If it has the type signature & follows the laws, it's a Monad. That's the definition. No need for a cute analogy-oriented name like FlatMap-able or Then-able.

Once you do that, you realize that the way to understand these things is to play type tetris with highly-generic type signatures. You stop needing English/real-world analogies to understand them and instead use the type system to understand the world (the reverse of using "nice" names)

It works really well but it is a steep hill to climb. It helps to talk to others who have climbed it, and it helps to just grind on a project and use Monads without being an expert. You can go a long way just knowing how `do`, `traverse`/`mapM`, etc work and not having big Monad intuition.
Plus in other countries, they expect a massive uptick in polio, tuberculosis, etc., due to lack of vaccination and treatment.

Some of this is inevitable. Some of this is due to economic lockdown, which will simply crush third-world economies.
Why do celebrities and others think it's a great, smart idea to saddle their kids with crap names?

Other dumb names:

Mr Lear of LearJet named his daughter Shanda.

I grew up knowing a girl called Robin Banks.

There was another girl in my town called Ophelia Dickie.