skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Shopify is an insanely huge e-commerce platform (and a $100B company).

That's an interesting note. They have a $90b market cap, trading at ~53 times sales. It's one of the more extreme valuations I've seen in the last 25 years, including the dotcom bubble (and that's saying something with how overvalued everything cloud-related is today).

As one comparison for the absurdity, Yahoo during most of the height of the dotcom bubble, was trading for 30-50 times sales, growing sales faster than Shopify, and they were solidly profitable (Shopify has never earned a consequential profit in its history). That's how bad Shopify's present valuation is, to get good comps you have to reach into the dotcom bubble.

The market thinks they're Amazon-like. The problem is they've never demonstrated any great margins in their platform (despite 14 years and counting) and Amazon's big lift-off in their stock occurred solely due to the ability of AWS to generate immense operating income. Without AWS, Amazon eventually gets the sad multiples of a Target or Walmart on their retail business.

This is an obviously mistaken valuation riding one of the most overvalued markets in US history, one that will most likely brutalize investors that get in late. It's a classic example of how very inefficient and irrational the stock market can be in the shorter term. And no, that doesn't mean an investor should be the fool to step in front of the irrationality train and short it either (everyone here probably has heard the Keynes line about the market remaining irrational longer than you can remain solvent).

It'll take at least 10-15 years at a minimum for Shopify to grow into its present valuation, in the best case scenario, if everything goes perfectly and they some day find some margin in their business. If they eventually manage an enormous $2 billion profit ($1.7b in sales today ttm), they'll still have a 45 PE ratio at today's valuation. That's a prime market example of insanity.

eBay has a vastly superior business (in all regards, including its quasi-monopoly positioning and the tremendous profitability of ebay's platform), trading for a huge discount to Shopify, on the basis of the market's mistaken extrapolation about Shopify's future. If they're lucky, they'll one day be the size of eBay with a fraction of the profit margin (and of course eBay has a mere $29b market cap, 12x op income multiple; compression is a killer). I mention eBay (beyond obvious reasons), because Shopify is likely doing nothing more than pulling future returns forward to an extreme, as eBay once did (leading to a decade of stagnation in the stock).
Apart from my index finger and thumb, the tips of my fingers all kind of curl together to some degree, so my roman one and two would look much the same, and I have to strain to get a rough 5. I often wonder if I could retrain my brain about this with enough time.
Actually lights consumes more than fridges in terms of residential electricity.
> "Solar is clearly economic in many markets, but we'll never get grid emissions in a place like California down much more without storage."

even before reliable utility-scale storage, there is a lot of low hanging fruit from covering the southwest US in solar and wind. but yes, the costs of intermittent power like wind and solar doesn't by itself end with installation.
I started off with a tree and some other mundane things, and it nailed the first 5-6 in a row (car, house, smiley face, scissors). It thought my dog was a cow, and apparently I don't draw very recognizable kites.
It seems crazy, but Preview is genuinely a big part of keeping me stuck in the Apple ecosystem. That iOS doesn't have anything like it is the main thing keeping me from ditching macOS for iOS (+ remote Linux VMs), even. It's a sign of how crap the UX is or has become on Windows or Linux that it's so surprising to have a basic utility program function so reliably, so well, and with such light resource use, while consistently delighting with its versatility.

I have similar feelings about their office suite. In general their add-on and utility software is just great. I'd miss all of it on any other platform (and do, when I use those—yes, even the file manager, which is still less crashy, less prone to weird interface bugginess, and more consistent than any featureful equivalent I've used on Linux, and I've used... oh, all the big ones, over the last 20 years, and I don't find it any worse than Windows Explorer, aside from preferring some of the latter's hotkeys) but of all of them... yeah, Preview may be #1, which was not something I expected when I first started using OSX/macOS about 10 years ago.
Source on your Uber "fact"?
>because it's not encrypted. Is that correct?

You know what's so great about that!?!?!

Senator Burr had a hand in forcing apple to not encrypt icloud backups!

I'm sorry for my open Schadenfreude here, but I can't help feeling a little glee. I never realized how petty I am. But this is better than a tall, cold, delicious parfait on a hot summer day.
I don't think Dropbox use/d Rails. But you can add Gitlab to that list which is a VERY good company.
If my understanding is correct there is curious difference in perceived scale with kinetic vs thermal energy. Based on a a rowing machine's advertised metrics, I calculated you could row across the English channel on half a packet of chocolate biscuits.
Like with the Gates Procedures.
Could be worse, at least she made a buck off it. Think of the children of the people flooding Reddit with porn content of themselves, in which they're easily identifiable, for free.
> You have no way to know that “our experience of life is always changing.”

The experience we have is always changing, even if our material condition stay the same. That's what I mean here.

> Maybe the people who died on the bridge would’ve hated surviving?

Sure, at that moment, but what about 3 days later, or 3 months, who can tell?

So, my argument here is in life, nothing is permanent, while death is.
I think that's actually something that movies and video games have in common. If you find a random key in real life, it's very unlikely to be useful. If you find a key in game while exploring a dungeon, you can be pretty sure there's a locked door you'll want it for somewhere later on.

(I remember an old blog post Eskil Steenberg I read years ago about game design and procedural generation that talked about this; specifically, about the difference in the feel of the game between making sure there's only one solution to every problem, or allowing for some degree of flexibility so that the player is sometimes able to achieve their goals in unexpected ways.)
To hire so many you have to hire a lot in parallel. Also, even once hired, probably the engineer shouldn't have "interview more engineers" as his first priority.
I was incredibly disappointed they didn't film in Atlanta. Though most of the season takes place in the Atlanta metro, it's very obviously filmed elsewhere. None of the filming locations actually resemble Atlanta. As an Atlanta resident, I found it uncanny and jarring.

It's doubly strange considering Atlanta has generous film subsidies and tax breaks, making it one of the nation's top filming locations. They might have saved money shooting here. Stranger Things and a host of other Netflix shows are based here.

I don't normally nitpick about something like this, but it frequently took me out of the story.
Flowtron TTS does voice acting
Cut down on the energy we expend, minimize the amounts of materials we use, focus on technology that consumes less energy rather than just attempting to make more of it in marginally less dirty fashion and so on.

Instead of promoting electrical cars which consume vast amounts of materials and still run on a dirty energy mix cut down on the car reliance altogether, for a trivial example.
Well, she secretly slept with and lived with one of her investors who also had some important position within the company. So there's that.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/03/227176/elizabeth-ho...
Coronavirus Finishes the Retail Reckoning That Amazon Started
pornel is right, but to be extra clear: if that happened and the types were mis-matched, it’s not very quiet: you’d get a compiler error. We don’t implicitly coerce numerics.
I don't feel like the average person who says "I'm ok with females selling sex" would actually be ok + proud of their mother / daughter / sister / grandma / cousin if they sold sex for a living.
> Type inference works only when the types are unambiguous

It looks to me like when the types are ambiguous (because nothing placed a restriction on them), integer literals become 32 bit and floating literals become 64 bit. Then quietly, later when you add a restriction, the code above (which you've already worked through one line at a time with debug statements and all) changes from underneath you.

> You can still declare types ahead of time if you want to.

When the implicit stuff is surprising, I'd rather it wasn't ever implicit.
https://codepoints.net/U+1F917
Not everyone is willing to take Forbes speculation at face value:

https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/reuters_report_on_apple_d...
Link to the I AM AI video narrated by Flowtron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf2S7OzFEg&feature=youtu.be...
They are probably overvalued.
But they have a great product worth tens of billions and will eventually get earnings in line with their valuation. I wish I bought that stock years ago. No, wouldn't buy it now indeed.
Uber CEO reportedly favored rank-and-file layoffs over pay cuts for top execs
“(G) if the target of the electronic surveillance is an elected Federal official or a candidate in a Federal election, that the Attorney General has approved in writing of the investigation;“
Which is, of course, under the delegated authority of the governor.
For backend engineers who have trouble understanding that the front end is what all the work is in service of, tell them that the frontend us the Tests for their Test Driven Design.

I say this as a backend engineer. The backend genius shines when we figure out how to serve the frontend efficiently (low compute cost) and adapt to rapidly changing frontend requirements without delaying releases.
> they don't have a real job and want to get rewarded for minimal effort

Most people on OnlyFans have a “real” job and are using the platform to supplement their income. Not unlike people who drive for Uber on nights/weekends.
> the less you have to think about surviving the more you can think about improving your life.

This is still very much true in our current non primordial "advanced" world.
Exactly, and the nature of the layoffs in this situation only supports this: Cruise (like other SDC companies) has switched their stance from "launch is imminent" to "we have more technical work to do". The fact that business development, product, and marketing were the lion's share of the layoffs seems like exactly the strategic move that a pushed-off launch date would imply, economic downturn or no.

Evidence against this is the fact that they also laid off lidar engineering staff in Pasadena; I don't know Cruise's business, but this also seems like the kind of consolidation you'd expect a relatively healthy company to do (though "healthy" is a weird word for a pre-product R&D co).

Source: https://electrek.co/2020/05/14/gm-cruise-lays-off-8-of-staff...
There are things on the backlog where nobody knows how long it will take. For example trying out something new or chasing down an elusive bug. It may take a few hours or it can take weeks or months.
And you are supposed to trust images not to have vulnerabilities?
> A view having been held and taken for granted for a long time doesn't make it correct.

The leftist mob of blue Twitter checkmarks has been cancelling people since about... 2012? It's trendy to be pro sex work, anti-corporation in 2020.

The majority of people commenting online about how "pro sex work" they are do not have a sex worker in their life by a longshot. It's all theory/keyboard warrior/armchair activist stuff.
And if you add the under part of each finger you get 16 x 16, which is pretty handy for software engineers because it overlaps the increments used in the binary system (16, 32, 64, 128, 256)
Although I do have a college degree (though not in CS), I do feel that adding unessential certificates "in lieu of" education works against you. It just highlights the fact that you believe credentials are important (otherwise why did you invest in them) but you still avoided one of the most recognized credentials that exists. If you have extensive work experience this may flip, though (I've been busy working, so while I couldn't go back to college I could invest in meaningful credentials).

Additionally, it's difficult to surmise how certain credentials are viewed. I graduated from a tech bootcamp (i.e. hundreds of hours of instruction) and it weighed negatively on my resume in most cases (and when it was positive it was largely from other graduates, giving it more of a "club" credential vibe than an actual value signal).

In either case, I'd never recommend against obtaining a credential (even if it's not going to go on a resume) as the subject matter will likely be useful. Just be sure to only try to apply a credential when it's relevant, not as an educational stand-in.
And it's also common to truncate 64 bit pointers down to 48 bits to pack other info alongside them, since those are the only bits that actually get used on most architectures.
Your site looks great too--love it!
> we only need to slow down cars to 25mph where pedestrians are present.

I don't have the numbers on hand, but I would wager to guess that a good chunk of road injuries and deaths happen not just between drivers and pedestrians, but between drivers and other drivers.

Also, most areas in the US where pedestrians can be present are already limited to 25mph/35mph.
Hurricanes don't form near the equator due to the equatorial subduction zone.
BTW, daily reminder that Taiwan is a separate country and definitely not part of China. :)
Conservation of Complexity
Close, this means that if you reset it on a regular basis advertisers will see you as a new person each time because so few people do it that they don't invest resources into handing it.
How Covid-19 Is Changing the World: A Statistical Perspective [pdf]
> Of course it is considered...

One would certainly hope so, but lots of weird things happen on this planet.

Where could someone who is interested to learn about the degree to which this is true go to read about what is really happening on the ground? Where did you learn about it?
Ask HN: Online Compiler Courses?
Compilers are one of the few major topics that was never covered in my CS education, but I've really taken an interest in them lately. They also seem like something that really would benefit from a structured curriculum.

Any recommendations for an online course?
“(G) if the target of the electronic surveillance is an elected Federal official or a candidate in a Federal election, that the Attorney General has approved in writing of the investigation;“

Exactly.
Badass. Where do you live, and can I come skate?
Many years ago, my brother was booking a lot of large jobs in China. The equipment he worked on was located in small towns throughout the countryside and usually required him to be onsite for several days. He had minimal familiarity with the language, and it was rare to find english speakers in these remote locations. It was especially a problem in restaurants because the menu would only be availabe printed in kanji.

Since I could read kanji, he asked for help. In return, I sent him pictographs for fish, chicken, pork and beef. He wasn't going to become fluent, but at least he could point at something on a menu with some confidence.

He memorized the four characters before his next visit to a restaurant. As he skimmed the menu, he found the character for chicken and pointed to it. The waitress nodded and within a short time she returned with an enormous platter piled high with chicken's feet. Nothing else, just chicken's feet.

No, they were not intending to prank the foreigner. In China, chicken's feet are a delicasy....and I will never hear the end of it.
Started playing around with the VCV Rack SDK, I've made a somewhat functional pitch detection module so you can create V/Oct signal using audio from a real instrument.
States with Tightest Lockdowns Have Highest Infection Rates
It would be nice and easy just putting some sensors or special paint on the road, the problem is when those automatic vans share the same space than the rest of vehicles, you will have a crash frequently, in barcelona the light rail has crashed with several vehicles even when they don’t share the platform but on the intersections with crossing streets
This sounds awesome will be interested in trying this out
> Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.

How do you know this? Serious question.
Considering how the low cost of shipping enabled globalization I doubt the shipping costs matter much. I'm also not sure if environmental protections are that much more stringent in the US than in Taiwan. Higher healthcare costs and water might make sense, but the bulk of the water cost in semiconductor manufacturing is probably due to the purification processes required than the volume of water used.
> the free and fast flow of information enables decentralization, and would liberate us from all the old forms of political control.

Of course, it turned out precisely the opposite.
What goes in the database? The whole universe? What do you leave out? What do you denormalize and index? These questions are answered by the frontend.
Ah, sorry for that. I meant E[return on option - cost of option] ~= 0.
Hypothesis was working on web annotation, https://web.hypothes.is/about/
One of my favorites (by Issa):

This world of dew
is a world of dew,
and yet, and yet.
I've spent a lot of time in therapy. If it were somehow the way I write, I would be thrilled to pieces to learn that fact and correct it.

After nearly 11 years of being told things like "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog if you don't tell them" and having it suggested to me that if my gender is an issue, I should simply hide that fact, I'm pretty darn sure it's not the way I write. It's the way the world reacts to women.
It probably was, many times over.
It's interesting because Lars Bak was optimizing Smalltalk and Self VMs in the 90s.
What I mean is that oftentimes on Windows, I use non-OS tools or applications which are not made with the expectation that you will want to script them or configure them via text interface.
Agreed, the goal isn't to replace transit in places that are well suited to it, its to provide better transportation in all the places transit isn't well suited.
I laughed out but feeling guilty now. Homosexuality and rapes in prisons aren't uncommon.
It won't - if the idea is to keep it confined to specific overland routes, it is economically absurd vs. trains.

But that's not the idea. It is the camel's nose under the tent.

The goal is to get them on the road somewhere, and then gradually expand use as they can re-legislate at the cost of pedestrians.

There's a template for doing this - when cars were first commercialized, pedestrians had to be kicked off the roads, so they invented "jaywalkers", and launched a huge propaganda campaign to make it a thing[1].

Too much money and priming has been dumped into self-driving tech to abandon, so they'll try to create markets by pushing the squishy slow things that complain when they get smooshed out of the way.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
I feel the same about those Twitch streamers. I really dislike opportunistic people trying to cash in on something they wouldn't be interested in if not for money. It cheapens the thing that is supposed to be a passion for others. Too many Twitch streamers and Youtubers who don't provide much value other than being a pretty face. The idea of Twitch was supposed to be rewarding gamers for their hard work and passion doing something that at first wasn't profitable at all to do full time until their efforts proved that a market was there. Now it's a glorified camwhore site.
I think it has a harder time if more than one object is present in the image no matter what you draw.

Even if the other stuff you draw is just a random line segment a bit close to the actual picture.
It does not say they will be extensions of existing IKEA stores.
Ours was Spectre[0] as our school had a Macintosh lab. We learned to pick locks on that lab door, to sneak in and play the game together during lunch. Thankfully the lab teacher was an extremely passionate nerd like us, so was understanding, but it still involved a fair few lunchtime detentions over the year or two we did it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(video_game)
Teapot: Type-Safe 3D Spreadsheet
I mean it's quite simple. It serves the user at the cost of the community at large.

HN has similar problems because you can edit your post after people have replied to it. This means you can retroactively change history and how prior arguments were framed, which can make other people look like idiots or completely destroy a comment chain.

If you're really concerned about anonymity or your history being used against you, then create throwaways. Otherwise you're not stopping corporations from keeping tabs on you, the moment you hit post that data's already been scraped and stored somewhere.
Doing some calculations from another direction:

The maximum daily energy density of sunlight in sunny Los Angeles is about 6.4 kWh / m2 [1] (assuming perfect, moving angle of panels to sun).

If we can turn the entire footprint of a Model X into solar panels, that gives us about 10 m2 (big car!).

The US DoE reports the Model X gets 100 mi / 31 kWh [2]. Or 12.4 kWh for 40 mi.

So those panels would need to get 1.2 kWh / m2 of solar power. Which is about 18% efficiency and pretty reasonable for good consumer panels [3].

But it assumes the car is in sunlight all day at the perfect angle, there is no loss (eg due to weight), in a locale as sunny as LA (eg Seattle gets half of the sunlight as LA), and can be completely coated in efficient panels (the model S solar roof is <1 m2 in comparison). Bumping efficiency to 30% gives some headroom but it still seems pretty impractical.

[1] https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=34.270738,-116.929301...

[2] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=41196

[3] https://news.energysage.com/what-are-the-most-efficient-sola...
Aarogya Setu: Why India's Covid-19 contact tracing app is controversial
I thought you just meant in general.
Yeah I think I did some back of the napkin calculations that this would be feasible if we put solar panels on every roof. One challenge is that installation is still pretty expensive from a labor point of view because roofs are all unique to one degree or another (age, orientation, composition) and the parts and knowledge to DiY aren't yet commonly available at the local big box hardware store. Plus you have to interact and interconnect with the power company so its another layer of complexity and specialization. Adoption could be greatly accelerated if we had something that made installation of panels on houses a priority especially for lower income households in both the developed and developing world as they would in theory benefit the most from really cheap electricity or at least lower electrical bills. As it stands now it can pay for itself over time but typically on the scale of decades and there are a lot of middle men who will install them and then own the panels and try to profit off of the price differential.
Pretty much the same as the reason why stacking fans adds little benefit unless they rotate in different directions.
Permutation City is fantastic!
I think they’ve been here for a while, personally.
If they'd tried testing nitric oxide+vitamin D released from skin, they might've seen different results.
Todorant – a smart todo app that tricks your brain into completing tasks