skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, I also think a lot of people overengineer things that are made simple with recent technology and that in fact most companies don't need the best engineers to get their job done.

I think it's totally true that one can leverage new tools to get more work done with less people, especially when it's for a service that doesn't reach scale and what not. Most companies don't need that to be lucrative. But I think the space of problems expands, whether that is more fields valuing tech, feasible complexity increasing in others, or competition just ratcheting up by lowering technical barriers to entry.
That must be it, thanks!
You can get people build things in a matter of months but definitely not complex things.
AirBNB had less than a few thousand employees in their HQ, I think their engineer count was under 1000. In the scheme of things that is not a lot of engineers.

And Uber did not write their own slack, they set up a mattermost instance and then put some logos on it. It's a bit more than complex running an exchange server in a corporation.

Most of the money burned by these companies was in the operations, marketing and incentive side, not on the engineering side.

My estimate at the end of this will be a second tech bubble, due to way more money being printed and given to bankers again, even lower interest rates and surprise surprise, software is one of the few things giving a return, yet again.
Interesting read, thanks. Really drove home the point of how bad soda and energy drinks are.
To be honest: all of the office equipment is a mere fraction of a month's of an engineer salary, providing the basic tools for your workers that is less than a month's salary is nowhere a "cost-saving measure", even less when you are saving on real estate...
> a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination.

Your conversations with the guy next to you, or the guy at the watercooler is unstructured.
When you communicate about a specific issue you might communicate in an email or issue management system, but that doesn't mean there is a need for unstructured communication too.

> people seeking out help should RTFM
> Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the part of the process where they're expected to make an effort.

All informal/unstructured communication isn't just "people asking for help". It's navigating an organization and just communicating (who is it that manages thing X in our company? I can't use email today, is it just me? Who wants to go out for lunch?). It would be absolutely horrible to fit all this impromptu and unstructured chat into a forum or issue management system.
Doctors condemn secrecy over false negative Covid-19 tests
With the exception of popular torrents (where swarm health is usually a non-issue), most of the time download speed is limited by the number of seeders and their upload speeds, not the leechers’ download speeds. The problem arises when all leechers request the beginning of an old and/or obscure torrent from one or few leechers.

> there isnt anymore the "everyone wants to download far more than they can be bothered to upload" issue.

There’s the “people quit their BT client as soon as they finish their download” problem which faster internet doesn’t solve.
I.d.k. I would say choose your language based on the community and the problem you are trying to solve.

I.e. my next team project that won't be in Python would probably be in Rust, as other colleagues are pretty excited about it.

My personal stuff might be something a tiny bit more obscure, i.e. Haskell, Ocaml, or even some APL dialect.
I'd recommend Ripcord [1] as a blazingly fast native app that can talk on Slack and Discord while taking a max of ~50-100MB of memory at any given time, even with lots of connections/channels open.

[1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
There is tool from Microsoft which is used also internally. It has predefined questions for actions over boundaries.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/securityengineering/sdl/thre...
Big pharma rejected EU plan to fast-track vaccines in 2017
Occams Razor is not about the likelihood of a theory being true. It says that out of two theories which both explain observations you should chose the simpler.

It is not a statement about the world, it is a principle of economy of thought.

According to the logical positivist, two theories which explain the same outcome are equally true. Believing that one theory could be "more true" despite both predicting the same outcome is basically religion, since you are believing in some metaphysical "objective truth" beyond observation.
I think "green" is not the right moniker here; "renewable" covers it better I think. With (with my limited knowledge, naive opinion) solar panels and wind farms having less of an impact than hydro dams.
> To be clear: DoH and/or DoT would have stopped the gathering of DNS query data in this case. It's simple to set up, and it's just a smart thing to do for anyone concerned about their privacy.

Actually, for most people that are not technically savvy this is definitely not an easy thing to set up, nor are they even aware that DoH/DoT exist.

Unless this feature starts being turned on by default in routers and popular software, the average user's DNS lookups will not be protected.
Replace "Orions Arm" with "Star Citizen" for chuckles.
I remove the UTM too and I don't think it's unethical.

Digital marketers try their best to segment people properly, to measure everything accurately, etc but in the end there's NO WAY to do these things perfectly!

There's a lot of measurement inaccuracies after all and it's a normal part of their job... They find other ways to achieve their goals.
Working on FLOSS is nothing like working for a boss. The common denominator is git commits but apart from that one is a self directed pleasurable hobby and the other is getting stuff done for a business.

Coders want good money because they realise the value to businesses and if their good they realise how rare good coders are vs. gen pop of applicants.

We are far from coders on minimum wages.
For every anecdote there is a counter anecdote! I was born and grew up in a country that (eventually) became hyper capitalist (maybe more like the UK than the US) & then moved to social democratic countries as an adult (first Austria then Germany).

In both of these the quality of life is so much better than in my home land, despite the fact my earning here is a bit lower and I pay more taxes on that earning - you get so much for free/cheap from the government here that I don't mind paying the higher taxes & life is so much less stressful: free kindergarten from age 1, 14 months parental leave, 200 euro per child for 18 years (up to 26 years if they study & don't yet have an income of their own), university is free, healthcare is free (it is nominally free in my home country but here a lot more is included in the free tier & the quality is higher), tenants get protections people from my home country find hard to believe when I tell them, and the list goes on and on.

So yes, life in Moldova, Belarus or wherever you come from is shit but it's not shit because socialism can never work. And nobody is arguing in becoming more like the Ukraine they argue in favor of becoming more like Sweden.
a cheap global service to watch anything anytime

I don't know about Hollywood movies, but for TV shows that would require the makers buying a perpetual license for anything they use in the show. That would probably make it too expensive to make something anyone would actually want to watch. Shows would have to have no cultural references (eg a pop song) in them at all.
I used it ~7 years ago, and loved it.

Our manager loved it much less, because the ramp-up to productivity was around a month for people not familiar with the language, so after our tech-lead left for another project, we spent six months rewriting the thing in python :-/
Brazil is a big country, not everyone lives in São Paulo. Why would they close Palo Alto in any case? they want to add to the talent pool, not exchange it. Also, not everywhere you see offices they have engineering teams. The same narrow-minded policies of having teams co-located prevents them from hiring engineers there even if they have offices there.

As a data point, I turned down an offer for FB Palo Alto, one of the main reasons being having to relocate from Toronto. They have offices in Toronto, but no engineering.

Bottom line, they might have some presence in some major cities, but if they're serious about remote work the talent pool definitely grows significantly.
Show HN: Foreign Exchange Rate Web App
About a month ago, there was a post on HN for free foreign exchange rates API (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22979288)

The API was quite easy to understand and inspired me to do a one-day build challenge of making a web UI for the rates as I learn Javascript and D3.js.

Things I want to do but couldn't fit into deadline: better mobile reponsive, making it a "PWA".

Feedback is much appreciated.
By having an actual plan for the second half. Someone has to bell the cat, and people are rightly sceptical of hand waving there.

It's never the messaging that's the hard part, it's the planning that's the hard part. Especially since the messenger always gets the credit.
For WTF reason would we build another JavaScript framework?
Actually we don't know that. May be a couple of loudmouthed people.
Sadly that wouldn't help much since lots of important stuff happens on the same thread(s) that run JS. You also have the issue of javascript from website 1 trying to steal data from website 2, in that case pinning them both to your JS core wouldn't actually protect you from the attack.

Among other things there are now mechanisms for doing page rasterization (PaintWorklet) and sound synthesis (AudioWorklet) in JS, so the overhead involved in making all your JS share a single core becomes more dramatic. There's also lots of stuff out there that uses Shared Workers and Workers to do background computation and that won't be background anymore if you pin them all to your JS core.
Personally, I can't see a reason to see these many people at one time.

Nine people on the screen is a nice ratio, and if the 10th person says something, they take the place of the person that hasn't said anything the longest on the grid.

There are other reasons I dislike Teams, but this isn't one of them.
This seems strange considering the popularity of Caffeinated beverages in WW2 and Muckefuck post War.

If she is 90, maybe this is some sort of propoganda fallout from WW1 induced shortanges?
It's not that baffling or secret at all. The only baffling part is how they thought the FDA's specific ban on doing at-home testing under this provision wasn't actually a ban on at-home testing because people were only taking the samples at home, as though this wasn't explicitly the exact, specific thing this ban was created to stop, and how Nature are going along with this narrative.
When you want to master the art you can follow the Northcutt guide: https://northcutt.com/seo-checklist/
>> I don't think that either of these claims stands up to any real scrutiny.

I think they mean in particular the Intel ME. It all probably is more true than false. See

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/
>a syctl-style file, and what goes in a rc-style file?

sysctl.conf controls the system example:
kern.randompid=1

Booting the system (modules driver etc)loader.conf:
fuse_load="YES" << mind the _load

Start Services after loader and sysctl (rc.conf):
hald_enable="YES" << mind the _enable
Did you turn off safe search? I don't get porn with these search terms. Unless I turn off the porn filter.
International Travel Restrictions
Coronavirus has put a wrench in everyone's travel plans. Stay up-to-date on the latest updates on travel restrictions around the world.
Check out also SearchMage - it can filter search results for several search engines and provides some extra functionality as well:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchmage-se...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/searchmage/oldjnha...
Indian Celebrities Who Have Their Own Business
I would argue this can never be true. If software gets to a point where today's problems can be solved by a 5-minute specification, engineers will be able to do more high-level engineering, connecting dots with those building blocks.

One example is memory management: At some point, we started having languages and powerful-enough hardware that engineers didn't have to worry about memory anymore (for certain classes of applications), so they could spend more time thinking of other things. It's not like switching from C to Java would cause a software company to get rid of 40% of its devs because there's now less work - it's just that one hindrance is gone. But there's always plenty to do; the backlog never gets emtpy.
If they had said mastic I would have been there like a shot. Mastic and gum-arabic were used extensively in the ancient world.
I run an IRC network (this one: ircs://irc.darkscience.net/darkscience) and there are shortcomings with the protocol for sure.

I've been a staunch advocate for IRC for a while, but the truth of it is that there's nothing built-in for reliability. It assumes reliability from TCP.

If the TCP connection is interrupted, you will be disconnected.

If a route on the internet changes, you will start losing incoming and outgoing traffic; and you will be kicked from the server with a ping timeout. Losing messages shouldn't be possible without a route change on the internet that drops state, but I suppose if there is a leaky bucket style buffer cache somewhere in the pipeline it could happen?

In a similar vein; mattermost, when I ran it, would deliver messages out of order or not at all- I believe this was caused by nginx and a limited amount of buffer caches.

I suspect that the reason slack forces you to use their client is because they're working around protocol limitations like this with retry logic, because I've had messages not delivered with programs like wee_slack or my python bot (which thinks it delivered the message).

Anyway, if you want a more reliable connection for IRC there is RobustIRC which alters the protocol to be more reliable. Also ircv3 extensions largely attempt to solve issues inherent with relying solely on tcp.
I think one approach when choosing more niche language might be, first look for a book like https://www.erlang-in-anger.com/, read through it and consider, if this is the sort of stuff my colleagues will want/be capable to deal with.

Then consider how hard it would be to get more people that have used such language/ecosystem in anger.
To put things in perspective we are closer time-wise to Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt than he was to the building of the Great Pyramids. Ancient Egyptian culture was immensely old, even at that time, and was basically continuous for the whole period.
California could trivially afford to just buy out the alfalfa farmers, paying them actually a slight premium compared to the revenue from their alfalfa farming.

That alone would fix most of California's water problem.
Even if it isn't an outright recession, it appears that VC funding is drastically pulling back, though maybe it's COVID-19-specific [0]. And the ongoing implosion of the Softbank Vision Fund seems to have had a domino effect that preceded the pandemic, with the waves of layoffs across that fund's wide portfolio in January.

It certainly feels as if some bubble is getting burst, even if it's not the entire tech industry's.

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2020/caution-ahead-startup-report-p...
I’m looking to get into the hosting space using containers. Basically combining my consulting business with a hosting one since I’m doing it already for clients anyways.

I’d love to exchange notes with you on the lessons you learned building your system and the challenges you faced.

I’m using rancher/k8s with docker on top of “unreliable” hosts with AWS/GCP/DO/Azure providing “spill over” capacity for when those unreliable cheap hosts prove why they’re unreliable.

Is it possible we could get in touch? You can reach me at hnusername at Google’s mail service. Would love to connect if you’re open!
Bootstrapping Teamwork.com to $30M ARR
Your point on complexity is well taken.

I'd just like to recommend against using thalidomide as an example of chiral effects. Rather unusually, thalidomide has a nitrogen atom as its chiral center. As such, it rapidly racemizes (interconverts) at physiological pH. This makes the claim of stereospecific teratogenicity a bit puzzling as it shouldn't be possible to resolve by administering enantiopure thalidomide.

The mechanistic story of thalidomide is a bit complicated. Ultimately the mouse and rat models used couldn't possibly predict teratogencitiy as these models have an amino acid mutation (valine -> isoleucine) that prevents binding of thalidomide to Cereblon, the protein that mediates thalidomide's teratogencitiy [0]. Amazingly, although this story is oft-repeated, its origins are unclear. This is likely the origin of the myth [1], but knowing what we know now these results should be impossible.

[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/38430
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/583234/
ttyplot: Realtime plotting utility for terminal with data input from stdin
I noticed that too initially - the CPU usage was very high while the movie was playing. So I wrote a script to control the resources used by it. Haven't noticed the issue since so not sure if the latest version is "good" or it is the script.
>This isn't rocket science, it's basic regulatory compliance

You think rocket science is harder than regulatory compliance? At least the rules of physics don't change all the time.

The majority of US health regulations have been written by medical corporations in order to keep competition out. While no regulation is certainly bad, current regulation for a large part simply drives up prices and lowers availability. Far more people in the US are killed by red tape than medical quacks.
> Unless this feature starts being turned on by default in routers and popular software

Firefox has DoH turned on by default for US-based users. Unfortunately being US-only, it won't protect Thai users just yet. Especially considering the fact that Thai ISPs have known to be hijacking port 53 and NXDOMAIN since forever[1] with ISP in the article being one of the biggest offender.

It might also worth nothing that PDPA, Thailand's equivalent of GDPR, is to become in effective in two days (May 27th) so this incident will be... interesting.

[1]: Starting in early 2000s, with NIPA (that I never see anybody uses), who aim to provide IDN-enabled Thai domain names by providing NXDOMAIN-hijacking services to ISP
Thank you for the feeback and guidelines! We understand, respect and share the deep dislike for any marketing noise.
In this case we do believe that each post in the series is a stand-alone post with its own clear value to the community.

We will refrain from sharing the next parts in the series, and come back to share the full series when completed.
Firstly, thank you for building this I have exactly the same itch and I'm so glad someone provided a way to scratch it.

> The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.

Could you explain a little more about how the stripping of the 'blacklist' works.
Honest question, but why would I want to see more than 9 people in a video conference?

Because it more closely mimics the experience of being in a room. For example maybe I want to listen to, or be, the person speaking while gauging reactions from facial expressions. I have a 30" 4k monitor, I can easily have 20-30 faces on screen at once in software that supports it.

If you read the MS forums there are plenty of complaints about this, a typical use case is a teacher or lecturer who wants to see their entire class.

I am totally OK with the number of faces on screen at once being a user-configurable parameter in the client - but 9 is a hard limit baked into Teams.
I'm pretty sure classification happens locally for Apple as well. They call it "on-device machine learning". It doesn't mention it for MacOS photos but I can see `photoanalysisd` running in the background on my Mac.

https://www.apple.com/ios/photos/
I thought there might be some interesting answers to such a broad question but everybody is talking about San Francisco which is the least interesting answer I can think of.
[misposted, deleted]
Consolidation of subway systems in London. Standardisation of rail gauges, screw threading, electrical outlets, phone networks. Basically standardisation of everything that just works and you don't notice.

Could go on... money, power grid, air traffic control, waste collection and disposal.
Even if that narration is something easily relatable by software developers, the simplification is too big to allow the reasonable comprehension of the subject.

So I still suggest anybody interested to really try to learn more about the actual science topics, instead of comforting themselves falsely believing they "understood" anything.

For the start, I would suggest the nicely produced courses:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/biology-the-science-...

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti...

Just to illustrate how non-intuitive our "common sense" is, the current estimate of the number of human cells in human body is 30,000,000,000,000 (30e12). The current estimate of the number of bacteria in human body (in the mouth and guts) is 3 times more.

The size of human genome (present in each human cell) is around 3 billion (3e9) base pairs (encoding information units of DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair ). But not all the information is in the DNA alone.

The biochemical reactions happen in parallel even when a single cell is observed.

The reconstruction of gene transcription, also played in the speed it actually happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY&t=248
I've been using this userscript since Google dropped the ability to block results years ago. It works across a bunch of search engines.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
In the UK you can claim a small tax allowance if you have to work from home - https://www.gov.uk/tax-relief-for-employees/working-at-home
Wake up, Neo...
The Matrix has you...
> There's a case to be made that people get the marketing they deserve, as evidenced in their voting patterns and buying behavior.

I hate it when people make this case, or in general anything along the lines of "revealed preferences". This hides a certain divide-and-conquer that's happening. A single individual can't, in general, influence the market with their purchasing behavior. A thousand buyers simultaneously switching vendors would register on someone's radar, but real buyers are uncoordinated. Consider the 3.5mm audio jack and phones. If all the people who were unhappy about Apple having the "courage" to drop it would band together and announce that they'll hold off with upgrading their iPhones or switch to Samsung, Apple would quickly reconsider. As it is, you've got lots of people complaining, but buying anyway, because they know they alone can't affect the market, and they need a decent phone.

This is related to a general observation that you can only "vote with your wallet" among the options available on the market. You don't have a way to vote for feature combination that isn't offered, for a product that doesn't exist.
PHP 8 features, improvements, and the JIT compiler
maybe it's not completely clear from your comment, but those chinese workers are actually living and manufacturing the bags in italy: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-wo...

which has a very strange globalization / branding backwards logic to it. - chinese production costs low / high margins on branded good originating in italy, ok, we do chinese manufacturing but inside italy....