skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can’t speak to this suggestion but I purchased the book and watched the videos and all of the guidance and material I remember is very sound and, in my experience, very enlightening for me as an engineer who’s worked in SaaS with very talented UX people but still struggle with coming up with clean UX on my own.
That's a specific implementation that relies on setuptools. An sdist doesn't have to use setuptools to be an sdist.

Wheels can be generated out of thin air, there is no requirement that setuptools or any tool is ever involved, if you wanted you could zip up a particular directory structure and it is a wheel.
There are real technical challenges in producing photographs of both light and dark skin, but the focus on light skinned subjects have led to an accumulation of technical solutions.

Computerized facial recognition has been progressing for something like 50 years, with each paper building on previous work. I suspect a parallel world where the dominant social group hard dark skin would explore different technical avenues, focus on ways of recognizing faces that lean less on tone, etc. Obviously it's hard to say with what we know now.

Humans have difficulty recognizing cross-ethnic faces, however I don't think dark skinned people are worse at recognizing same-ethnic faces than light skinned people. To me that suggests our social history is more to blame than some fundimental quality of skin tone.
For a while, TypeScript has been able to check types using JSDoc. Since 2.3 I think, back in 2017.
Ask HN: How to come up with side project ideas
Hey, lately I been Finding it difficult to come with ideas for side projects. I remember reading a while back Paul Graham and Sam Altman essays on ideas and also startup school.

Over the last couple of years I started building small side projects but this past year I wanted to work on a side project that generated money.

I built www.artsyspace.net as an MVP for an idea I had. Since I had no success and it seems it’s not a problem people are having I stopped working on it.

Now I’m thinking about my next project but I’m struggling trying to find problems to solve. I’m trying to be aware of problems which I can solve with software but they don’t seem like problems others are having.

Are there any interesting books on new industries or industries in need of technology solutions? How do you develop ideas for projects or startups? Have you had success with a side project or company? Would love to hear from you
Oh God. This is what is happening at my work. We have an API that has 200 write users and a public front-end that can do reads. None of it is heavy though, with most writes occurring for a month in the Winter and a month in the Fall. In the unlikely event of heavy write loads we could just scale up CPU/RAM for those two months. Any read load be solved with cache or spending time on the worst offenders in SQL. The Lead Dev is gung-ho that it MUST be a micro-service with K8, Kafka, and I'm sure a bunch of other shit we don't need for what is the same application that has been being written for half a century. Data in/out with business logic applied. The entire API has about 8 paths, with your basic HTTP methods for each. Its probably the smallest API I've ever worked on.

The positive for me is I am learning a bunch of stuff during the process. The negative for the project is he expects developers with no previous skillset in this space to design all this new (for us) tech without introducing technical debt. The downside for the client is...well guess.

It's sad. I am rewriting a problematic legacy application and creating a whole new one. I guess I can put K8 and the kitchen sink on my resume when I look for a new job just before this thing implodes on release though. I just wanted to write clean code man, thats all. There is a sadistic part of me that wants to grab some popcorn and see how this explodes in his face...there is also a part of me that wants to be proved wrong...I hate this job.
You're sort of right, but not quite.

It would increase demand in the short term, but this reduced class size is a response to disease. When the human malware situation ends, class sizes might go back up, and the increased supply from aforementioned increased demand might suppress wages.

This of course assumes that this event lasts long enough for the number of teachers to scale to meet this.
In addition, google trends limited to China doesn’t match their claim.
Hello!

The quality is currently limited by Google's API. I am working on getting some pre-trained models implemented, but voice processing is not my speciality as a software engineer.

I do NOT want to spread misinformation nor do we want to unjustly slander anyone. Tonight I will be adding a disclaimer mentioning the limitations of our service and will make sure it is forefront on the website.

Hopefully we can create a model which can deliver better results.
Expect to wait 15-20 years if you want liquor store style service.
The cure to that (reviewers who are not well read in their field) seems far worse than the disease.
> you have a very tangible chance of spending 12 hours doing it and hearing nothing back at all

...which is so very frustrating. It's painful to read things like this:

> That was all we asked; we intentionally left it open-ended. Some people tried to impress us with huge, elaborate apps that used different services and engines.

The people hiring viewed this as a trivial, small, meaningless ask. They are proud to have "intentionally left it open-ended."

Some potential candidates did not (through their own example) view this as trivial, they went ahead and poured a ton of time into it and most likely were "replied with well wishes" as the company moved on.

It's irresponsible.
> On one side, you want to avoid people "switching sides" and bring important secrets with them, possibly the reason why they've been hired by a competitor.

Noncompetes are only about preventing talent from working for the competition. They aren't really about protecting secrets, because those are already protected. There are laws against stealing trade secrets, and NDAs in addition to those laws.
Your paper is lovely and your work is valuable. Thank you for pushing the envelope just a little bit. Our modern world is built by as much of things like this - that push out science but by bit, as it is by advanced measured in monumental leaps and bounds.
Yeah, but in the meantime you might actually notice that your system is slowing down, investigate and possibly fix the issue or intelligently kill the right process.
Human trust is not actually transitive.

Is this like saying human trust cannot be 100% delegated?

If so, that seems to be the model of the third party CA system. As a user I really have little say in "who", e.g., the web browser, should trust. I have (unintentionally) delegated trust to third parties. They decide who I should trust. As a user, I am not supposed to care about or understand this process. This really does not sound like "authentication" to me because I have not authenticated anything. Everything is being handled by third parties.
This does not make sense.

Before scientists started reviewing each other, who at the journal was judging the work of scientists to be published? Scientists?
If Apple acquires a search engine, that engine will instantly lose most of its value. People do not want to use a search engine that appears to be a side-project.

What Apple should do, along with others in the industry, is jointly create and fund a new search engine, based on non-commercial principles.

I'll quote an old HN comment:

> I don’t understand why Google’s competitors don’t form an
> independent search engine. If I were Microsoft, I’d talk to
> Apple and others to see if they would help fund a spun off Bing.
>
> The internet badly needs a big alternative search engine that
> isn’t beholden to advertisers or dependent on a single
> corporate owner.
>
> The benefit of such a search engine (whose main incentive is to
> just be a good search engine) is obvious for the public, but
> would also give companies who rely on their own OS, leverage
> against Google.
The most popular cloud product (aws) has a really shitty managed k8s offering. This is perhaps the main reason so many infra teams have spent so much collective time into building k8s. If eks was as good as GKE, what you said is absolutely spot on.
Which Lynda courses would you recommend taking for starters?
Amen. I don't transpile to JS anymore. If the client is IE (no updates for 7 years?) and doesn't feel like installing FF, Chrome, Edge, or whatever, then it is what it is.

Modern static ESModule JS is quite good. I have several projects north of 30KSLOC written in modern JS. I'm not living in "undefined hell" because I use named-export ESModules, I check types all over, and I write quality tests. A little discipline goes a long way.
On k8s, you write those env variables into the deployment manifest that describes the container. If they are sensitive, pack them into a k8s secret and add that to the container instead.

You can use the external services the same way if they are already setup with things like DATABASE_URL that holds a postgres connection string to amazon RDS, etc. Running k8s doesn't mean you have to move your entire stack into k8s, you can still use hosted services just fine.

In all my time with k8s, I never used Helm. If you don't need it, don't use it and keep it simple. k8s can do a ton of stuff but in reality, you barely need more than the basic.
Coronavirus may only double overall mortality, but having no hospital capacity would cause a further increase in deaths.
We'd probably just end up in a real lockdown (shelter in place orders are not a lockdown) and have a bunch of extra dead people.
Every? B.S.

On Jan. 30 the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. That announcement is a trigger for the agency’s member governments to follow its recommendations. These include establishing a comprehensive programme of testing, quarantining people suspected to be infected, and tracing their contacts.

The US completely ignored it, while Germany, Signapore, South Korea, didn't.

Nobody is claiming the WHO is perfect, but come on, this is such political hogwash.
Gitlab CI is my weapon of choice here since it’s integrated nicely with Kubernetes. There’s a wealth of tools out there - but the work I do on managing PCGamingWiki is publicly available [1] to give you a starting point. I use Kustomize + kubectl, and when I need to rollback a deployment I can just do it from Gitlab’s environment page.

1: https://gitlab.com/pcgamingwiki/pcgamingwiki
Do you use Babel to polyfill JS? Minify? Concatenate? You’re transpiling. And not much more than TS. There is very little logic change that TS does and most of it is essentially the same as what Babel would do for polyfill reasons.
Most of the posts in this thread are noise.

Here is the established timeline so far:

Nov. 17 - earliest reported dates involving corona in China, reported by US disease experts

Dec. 1 - first reported Wuhan hospitalization confirmed to be corona

Dec. 15 - first date of non-Chinese people I know who became sick with a contagious flu in Shanghai with the same symptoms as corona

Jan. 15-19 - first US confirmed case in Washington State

Jan. 23 - Chinese internal travel ban

Jan. 24 - Disney closes Shanghai theme park.

Jan. 31 - Trump's travel ban on Chinese flights.

So the window of interest is international travel from Dec. 1 to Jan. 15 - certainly SFO and LAX were flooded with corona - a large part of the 100,000 pax per week arriving in the USA from China.

The hospital parking lot data is significant because China destroyed Wuhan Corona Lab data, and denied there was an epidemic.

They will never admit to the coverup publicly except under extreme duress from Trump because they want to protect their dictatorship (Chinese rulers historically seek internal credibility, even when they don't technically need it in the short term.)

If Xi has to choose between a total trade embargo (or seizure of all Chinese assets outside the country as reparations for deliberately infecting 200+ countries) and admitting the corona coverup, he will choose the latter: he will admit it outside China, and censor it internally.

Note that HNers erroneously focus on post-Jan. dates, when corona spread internationally months before.

First Confirmed US Hospital Case in Washington State

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191

For those new to the above data, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is in agreement, so check out his Youtube lecture videos. Search for "Victor Davis Hanson covid-19".
While the thesis is interesting and while there is probably some truth to it, the argument doesn't seem fair to me...

Sure if you repeat endlessly a task which is not related to the objective, it may fail to prove successful (without much surprise). However, if I repetitively compare images of one correct coin and one incorrect coin, I am pretty sure that I would improve in some way, without putting so much effort in the process. If every day someone recalls me the position of the nearest fire extinguisher, I will certainly learn this information at some point, once again without much effort.

And this type of wrong arguments can be reversed against the author thesis. Try to learn a new programming language while doing a one armed handstand, the difficulty will be way higher, however I doubt that it will generally improve your learning pace. Does that mean that difficulty is not a key to remembering? Nope, only that it is not per se a sufficient condition to remembering.
Did. Can do so again. CAN'T be caught with it atm.
Shit happens.
> Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.

Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not.

> I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?

You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily.

Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution.

Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.
I'll mention that to my US friends, cheers :-)
I misremembered what he said in the preface. I thought he had said that he was using Java less often, but what he actually wrote was, "I still like Java, though my ardor has cooled a bit as the platform has grown."
"I am trying to figure out how extinction events caused by a meteorite impact, massive volcanism or global glaciation could be manifestations of increased complexity."

A multitude of organism evolve over time, with more complex organism appearing in little ecological niches not occupied by existing species.

When an extinction event occurs, the entire ecology changes and the most fit, complex and well adapted organism now can fill many more niches.

Are you are saying that worlds populated only by simple organisms are effectively immune from mass extinctions?

No, nothing of the sort.
Show HN: Year-Progress Slack App
Time to go for FAANG and 4X that TC
It is hard to get a balanced training set when certain groups commit a disproportionate amount of crimes.
I think the problem is that in our industry you have many companies where you have 24yo, managers, or even folks under 26 with Director of Engineering titles, and they don't have either the experience or knowledge to sift through good candidates as they just don't have much real life experience.

Whenever i used to interview (years ago), 90% of older engineers were polite, more reasonable, and you could talk on and higher level... and in general they respect your time, as many understand that it is wasteful to just do stupid coding challenges just for the sake of it (especially if they have kids)

While 90% of the more junior developers are still too young to know what to look for in a good candidate. Unfortunately we are in a industry where often a 24 yo with 2 years of experience, and barely any real life experience, get to evaluate the performance of a 30+ yo, with 10+ years of experience.

This just doesn't happen in other professions such as Law or Medicine.
oh I have long accepted that and thought I was going to really blow things out of the water with my take-home interview projects.

turns out my UI ideas are phenomenal, but the mere familiarity and habitual object oriented programming isn't enough if your first thought isn't to use events and presenters and cram that into a 4 hour coding stream of consciousness.

this one large prominent company didn't even tell me that they preferred it on github, as a way to further gauge how long it took and commit practices. the recruiter just said you could zip it up over email, and then the submission page on the activity website said submit the git link. but "could" meant, not recommended and creating it a git repository now wouldn't show the utility of the git protocol with one single giant commit at the end. "don't prematurely optimize but show us your best" meant show us your best. gaslight gaslight gaslight.

oh but $500K compensation packages are supposed to be hard to get and full of pretentious antipatterns, you should be happy you routinely get call backs in less than 48 hours and are considered for these levels!

k.
Adding qualifications to rule out current events is weaseling. Cops are shooting crowds with rubber bullets, gas canisters, and pepper balls, resulting in maiming and death. A non-cop doing the same thing would be on the hook for second degree murder.

Aside from the shooting I did also say marching, which is another way cops purposely escalate the situation and then claim they were just doing their job.
> In fact, noncompetes are probably one of the biggest reasons Silicon Valley was able to take off...

Just noting a typo for anyone confused by the wording, I'm sure you meant "the unenforceability of noncompetes is..." or something along those lines.
Y'all are going to crucify me for this comment but I believe we also suffer this as a technology community.

We assume certain unhelpful behaviours are the norm and perpetuate toxic defaults through the majority illusion and what amounts to impostor syndrome.
The testing rate has also increased. Raw number of positive tests is a shit metric used to spread FUD and taken out of context
No, I didn't misread the end. I understand it (along with the rest of the post) very clearly.
Yes, companies need to be up front about roughly how much time they expect candidates to spend.

That said, if a candidate spends 12 hours or 10,000 lines coding up tic-tac-toe, the company is not entirely to blame here...
His Megalovania cover is great too.

https://youtu.be/1MJ2g7Eb0QE
Not sure if you realized how ironic your NYSE comment was given semi recent news...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyse-jeffrey-c-sprecher-kelly-l...
I have a pretty old, slow laptop on which I've been running Gentoo for a long time, so I'm frequently recompiling a lot of software. Over the years, as software has gone from being bloated to being insanely bloated (qt-webkit, firefox, and rust: I'm looking at you!), the "only" 8 gigs of memory that my system has just sometimes isn't enough, so adding swap has let me stretch the life of my system.

Sure, huge compiles are much slower when they hit swap, but at least it's possible to run them with swap, while it would be impossible for me to do so without.. at least until I can afford to get a new computer which can fit more memory.
but imho it's more fun to play with either cards you own or with a reasonable limit, because mtg is better with some kind of a social contract in force.
The “one identity key management system to rule them all” seems like a problem in search of a solution.

Why does every app have to use the same key management system?

What’s the problem with identity, exactly?

I already own my identity on every app I use. I know the password (or my password manager does).

Take HN for example. There’s no significant difference between HN asking for a password on a form, and asking a browser API for a certificate. Except the latter is more complex and prone to error.
Malcolm Gladwell has some very interesting analysis of class size:

https://www.businessinsider.com/classroom-sizes-too-small-ma...

He noted that with education budgets, smaller class sizes are chosen instead of paying teachers more, and that the data doesn't show the improvements you would expect.
Maybe it's in reference to the concern that flawed facial recognition tech can confirm the inherent biases of the person relying on the data?
I'm not OP, but in my case, no. I don't. I write a roughly ES7, and if you're on an ancient phone/PC, oh well. I really don't care. Not because people using those devices don't matter, but because I am writing code for a company in which I have a say in what hardware/software is provided to employees. I don't have to support IE. That's true of a lot of developers, for whom Babel is a waste of time.
Ask HN: Online accounting software for non-accountant in niche market?
Hi, my name is Loma a solo software developer based in Lao. I'm building bansi.la (based on https://akaunting.com/) to help my company organizes proper bookkeeping, automated journal entry, and reporting.

I've turned it into SaaS and there are currently 14 paying customers so far, mostly using it for bookkeeping.

My goal is to make bansi.la as a platform for accountants and non-accountants with reporting and auditing capabilities.

I am kind of facing the roadblock now. Either:

1. looking for an accountant co-founder to get a reporting certification from the tax authority, or

2. acquiring more customers and focus on customers' needs. building critical mass
> 18.2 / 25.3 ain’t bad.

It's somewhat worse than average, but trending in the right direction. Will give a qualified "OK".

> Sales and marketing at 19.2 seems a bit high, but I guess they’re doubling down on growth, and it implies they have a long runway.

It's very high, relative to written premium. You can always buy market share in insurance by increasing commissions and/or increasing marketing, and it's okay to overspend in the beginning for branding/momentum purposes, but it's not sustainable. They raised $500 MM, and spent $200 MM (and much of the remaining $300 MM is needed for statutory surplus) so who knows how much longer they can sustain that.

Administrative and tech I'm somewhat sanguine about, as long as they keep moving upmarket to Homeowners' insurance. Renters' insurance is never going to have a great margin. Tech is at least decent, and hopefully the kernel for expanding easily into other markets.
Is this really the case though? Feature wise it's not just the color of the skin that matters, and populations across Africa can look very different from each other's even to the human eye.
This feels awfully familiar. My current company uses the same generic username-password combination for every server.

But we aren't allowed internet access on our workstations because "security"
> Beethoven: Sonata No 14 (aka Moonlight Sonata), 1st Movement

Speaking of, anyone who's never heard the whole thing owes it to themselves to give it a listen. The 3rd movement is off the chain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0otuiQuU
The data doesn't show this. There are diminishing returns.

Reducing from 40 to 30 students creates improvements in outcomes. 30 to 20 does little.

https://www.businessinsider.com/classroom-sizes-too-small-ma...