skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff.

Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive.

Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one continent means you need the right balance of material going to that factory rather than simply upping the order for your single factory. Incorrect sales forecasts now mean you have inventory in Europe but need it in the US. You either need to pay to move it, try to get your suppliers to reroute things (always for a fee), or build finished units and ship them to the US, potentially facing higher tariffs than shipping in components [1]. Inventory costs are higher while you figure this all out, and you have increased logistics costs.

You're paying a (bigger) team of people to manage this, and expediting shipments as needed (likely at 3-10x normal cost depending on how expedited, market demand for shipping, etc).

Then there's product consistency. Even if you order identical equipment and keep all the same suppliers, you'll have different issues at each facility. Sharing best practices around the world is challengings and frequently done poorly. [2]

Then you have tariffs and government regulations. If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. [3]

--
[1] https://hts.usitc.gov/current offers some light trading if you want to find tariffs for the US. They're incredibly detailed, and the smallest difference could change from a 2% tariff to 60%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax is also interesting.

[2] I know of a distributed manufacturing setup where two "identical" factories have significantly different quality outputs. The best rationale they've come up with is a difference in altitude and climate.

Corporations who have distributed manufacturing like this often have a corporate team who travel between locations checking how well locations are adhering to the company defined best practices.

[3] Definitely don't discount this step! I've worked for 4 manufacturers professionally, and I know for a fact 3 of them have pushed for tariffs and exemptions from regulations. #4 likely did too, but I don't have a specific example in mind. In each case, the difference in profits were 7 or 8 digits long.
Yeah I had a friend attend for like $800 a year. My understanding at the time was that some other prestige schools were similar, like Stanford.

Others have followed suit - Northwestern recently announced that they would just grant financial aid recipients whatever part previously would have been loans.

When I was applying to college in early 2010s as someone who received financial aid (parents made ~$100k total), I could attend:

* [top 20 school - private] for ~18k a year

* [top 50 school - private] for ~18k a year

* [sub 200-rank school - the main in-state school] for ~$9k a year

* [top 20 to top 40 schools - state - out of state] for $30k-$40k...

These big state schools were the most surprising to me because everyone always says "if you're smart they'll have so many scholarships for you it'll nearly be free!"

But when it came down to it the good state schools weren't even in the running. I took the more prestigious school name for half the price.
I guess he meant it in a broad term and it's up to you to get creative. Now that I think about it, you can start by complimenting the resume for the employee you are interested in, and ask how he/she got there. Generally, if they are open to helping they’ll drive the discussion forward. Needless to say, if your first message/email is "please recommend me" it won't work. Personally, I always get back to first principles: Provide value first before asking something back.
Link?

> Samsung can commercialise cheap self emissive qdots within 2-3 years if they want

Fantastic if true, but I'll believe it when I purchase one for a price competitive with similarly performing technologies. I've seen enough promised display technologies that were "2-3 years away" to be very skeptical.
Do you have link to the paper ?
There's this thing called "Dopamine detox" which is basically trying to restrain from all the easy dopamine sources such as social media, news, games etc. and after a while learning Rust becomes as easy to accomplish than scrolling HN.
I love seeing all of these random meaningless "safe limit" numbers with regards to reopening things. Yeah, 40%, that sounds good right? Sure why not! Is this based on anything at all but an arbitrary bureaucratic decision? Nope!
Breakthrough in aerospace: new spacecraft could reach 30% the speed of light
This report doesn't seem to mention burn-in directly. This is IMHO the achilles heel of the current crop of OLED TVs. This is a very hidden fact. Everyone talks about how great they are and say they're the hands-down winner among popular TVs but after having owned one for 2 years it displayed horrible burn-in. They are fantastic while they last then they are awful. It would be nice to know how mLeds, uLeds, and the new tech sizes up for burn-in.
Honest question: if there is really an increase in cases across the US, shouldn't we see an increase in positive test result rates (# confirmed / # tested)?

The positive test result rate continues to decrease across the United States, albeit more slowly as of late.

I really do mean this as an honest question.
I literally went over the entire thing and tried to find anything which is adding value and did not find any. As of now I see this project as novelty or a hobby project. You are free to think that I am overreacting but a piece of crap will be called a piece of crap specially if it's getting hyped for no good reason.
It's simply not true that all essential workers do low skilled jobs.
Using Lumi for Ecommerce Packaging
In practice, EU does allow software patents. The software invention just needs to be disguised as a machine. Industrial property lawyers know very well how to do that, and it's unfortunately very common.

> Edited because I didn't know that some European countries accept software patents.

European patents are granted at the European Patent Office (individual european countries also have their own patent offices, whose patents can only be enforced in their home country).
The controller completely serves it's purpose- replacement for a pure mouse control for non-controller native games.

Anyone thinking they should always use a steam controller over a 360 controller for pure controller didn't understand the point of it.
What would be a good strategy? I think this makes sense for students and for professors, think of vulnerable people, the cost of going there and then the later canceling.
Cool, but impractical. With FVWM/WMaker you have usable screen state with system info and functionality.

You could replicate it with FVWM and using a 10th of the resources.

Inb4 Enlightenment back in the day, E16 used not as much as resources as this, even E21 is far snappier than ruling an NPM based desktop.
Great job. Handmade detailed models are always very impressive. Making it out of an odd material makes even more interesting.
You want to know why people are having difficulty trusting science? Because the institutions that guide science in the United States seem to frequently come to self-serving decisions.

In this case, Harvard is not allowing all first years to come to campus because it's safer; they're doing it because first years are more likely to defer if they couldn't go to campus.

If scientists want people to listen to them, start helping them. Don't lie about mask efficiency, because you want the masks for yourselves. Don't make other people lose their jobs, while continuing to collect your own paycheck. Don't admonish protests as being unsafe when they're conservative, but bless them when they're liberal.
Assuming that Autodesk refusing to do business with the coal industry has any effect, the only immediate effect would likely be an increase in energy costs, which would disproportionately affect the poor. Whether it would actually result in reducing greenhouse gas emissions seems more questionable to me.
The way this works in my experience is, I'm usually pretty happy where I am. Whenever recruiters or other opportunities find me, they usually fall short on comp, tech stack/maturity, culture/mission.

If not being paid above market value it takes away one of the big reasons to stay. And if caught at a low point it might be enough to open the door and look around.
Deaths are trending upwards, however, in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and all the other Southern hotspots.

This is an example of Simpson's paradox. You're looking at the sum of two different timelines, the virus in the Northeast (deaths declining) and the South (rising, but slow).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox#/media/File:...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/arizona-coronavi...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/florida-coronavi...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/texas-coronaviru...
Do you know what the false positive rates of these tests are ?
I’m not sure why a child-comment got killed:
>>> Not true. Deaths only lag cases by 5-10 days. For example, in Italy daily new cases peaked on March 21st and daily deaths peaked on March 27th.

This is correct. People are expecting a step function of deaths exactly 4 weeks from the peak of cases? This is not statistical. Peak of deaths lag peak of cases closer to 1-5 days. If case growth is a matter of true rise of infections we would see modest increase of deaths about 2-3 weeks ago (cases started growing 4 weeks ago). We’ve only seen deaths drop on a exponential decay trend.
In theory you can do such kind of search. Problem is that doing that is impractically expensive (and at least in some jurisdictions doing that can actually raise your liability in case of patent infringement).
He did mention he's addicted, so yes.
Amazing list!

> 9) Judge people based on objective results not on "optics". Ass-in-seat time is a lazy and pointless measurement in most cases.

I'd only point out that as a manager one also needs to be aware of the optics because those can affect other team members. "So and so is never here" kinds of murmurings need to be dealt with (and dealt with by, as you said, ensuring that the team judges based on results and celebrates winning together).
In my opinion, this should be formatted as a question and the title should start with "Ask HN: ". It might help if you provide anecdotal examples and observations that brought you to this conclusion. Provide one or more hypothesis on what a government would stand to gain from this. It may help you think through the problem and form a better foundation for discussion. i.e. give people more details to go on.
Author here! I worked on our babel plugin for React Native autocapture from day one. It's been a pretty interesting project. Would be happy to answer any questions you have!
I love iSH, but it frustrates me for being unnecessarily slow.

It forces emulation of x86. If only it could cut QEMU out of the equation it would be perfect.
Yeah. I keep meaning to dig into Blazor but it seems overwhelming at first (especially because I'm mainly a C# dev due to Unity and a lot of the .NET jargon is foreign to me).

There seems to be more lightweight "c# to web-assembly" routes than might be worth investigating.
This guy has truly mastered 3d printing!
I'm not sure where you are getting that frequently is proportional to voltage. Voltage in a synchronous generator is controlled by varying rotor excitation current. Frequently is controlled by varying the power to the prime mover.

But your main point is correct. This has to store energy to control frequency.
edit: I'll make one exception here. If a corporation was trying to rent seek in the sense that hiring a person who does literally nothing gave them a tax incentive or something, you could end up with an employee who has literally no functional purpose within the organization. They would still be serving a purpose as a proxy for the rent seeking but from their perspective they would be doing nothing.

This is still not a believable scenario in my mind as they employer would already be paying them and would probably have them do some other thing as well. Also the job would still have purpose it would just be very abstract.
Advertiser Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg
Do we want hammers to be restricted to only those whose political ideologies align with ours?

Yeah, why not? If you're a hammer manufacturer, then you should absolutely concern yourself with whether or not you're dealing business with ethical consumers.

I think if you commit yourself to your ideal, you're either going to end up being complicit in some really nasty stuff, or end up drawing a very arbitrary "line" where you stop being apolitical.
My favorite was the cubic equation captcha on the fake bank website -- which Grandma Edna (his character) had no trouble solving in her head because back in the day they taught arithmetic properly!

Kids these days.
This is only a partial buy of assets. In the deal Berkshire agrees to buy out 6 billion of debt (out of 70 billion in liabilities). It's not necessarily a deal that could be had in a fire sale, but one in which Dominion agrees to sell off assets that have some intrinsic value (around 10 billion by Buffet's estimation).
This flywheel is exactly about compensating rapid changes in production/consumption so that they do not cause rapid shifts in frequency which can cause disruptions to the whole grid.

The household electric devices or the long term frequency drift are not relevant there, it's about keeping the huge turbines everywhere else running at a stable rate. The other way to achieve rapid compensation for frequency drop is to disconnect consumers, i.e. automatically triggered blackouts.
I once got hold of the dutch book 'vuile jatten, schone handen' from A. De Rooi. I always wondered about the degree of reality of the book, but it might show part of what's going on.

In the book, a boy -the author- suffers severe neglect and betrayal, and grows up a criminal. Thief, mostly. His motives are complex.

He tends to see others as prey, there is the passion for the chase, he is fascinated by the criminal side of life. He seems quite smart and inventive, thinks his crimes through, but does not care too much about morals. Prison is a risk of the job. Otoh, close friends and partners are respected and can trust him.

It was a strange, interesting mix. I nevertheless hope I never meet the author.
That doesn't apply at all to doctors, pharmacists, firemen, police and most essential workers.
Ask HN: Free speech friendly VPS hosts?
Are there any VPS providers that are friendly in terms of hosting free speech? Some examples:

1. Controversial but non-violent political speech?

2. Legal adult content

3. Content critical of some big business

Hosts that actively protect the privacy of clients from frivolous complaints will be even better.
The idea that girls can’t be inspired by male scientists is extremely sexist.

> Parents mock geeks.

I was a kid nerd. I was mocked. (And bullied too, but I’ll take that one for the team.) Trust me, there was absolutely no encouragement provided for me, except by a few geeky teachers. If girls receive(d) approximately zero encouragement, that sounds like equality to me (though not how things should be!). The idea of geeks being cool, rich and popular is very recent, brought to you by the likes of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Big Bang Theory.
Video compression is a calculus of IO capacity, memory, and algorithmic complexity. Take the MPEG-1 codec for instance, it was new about 30 years ago. While today most people think of MPEG-1 videos as low quality the spec provides the ability to handle bit rates up to 100Mb/s and resolutions up to 4095x4095. That was way higher than the hardware of the time supported.

One of MPEG-1's design goals was to get VHS-quality video at a bitrate that could stream over T1/E1 lines or 1x CD-ROMs. The limit on bitrate led to increased algorithmic complexity. It was well into the Pentium/PowerPC era until desktop systems could play back VCD quality MPEG-1 video in software.

Later MPEG codecs increased their algorithmic complexity to squeeze better quality video into low bit rates. A lot of those features existed on paper 20-30 years ago but weren't practical on hardware of the time, even custom ASICs. Even within a spec features are bound to profiles so a file/stream can be handled by less capable decoders/hardware.

There's plenty of video codecs or settings for them that can choke modern hardware. It also depends on what you mean by "modern hardware". There's codecs/configurations a Threadripper with 64GB of RAM in a mains powered jet engine sounding desktop could handle in software that would kill a Snapdragon with 6GB of RAM in a phone. There's also codecs/configurations the Snapdragon in the phone could play using hardware acceleration that would choke a low powered Celeron or Atom decoding in software.
Do you have any hobbies at all?
As you might imagine, this is already the case in places like Shenzhen - there's off the shelf “building blocks” for machines - not necessarily to any written standard, though. In this[1] Strange Parts video he mentions it. If you watch some of his other videos you'll start to notice that many of the machines actually look similar - I highly recommend watching them, they're great.

[1]: https://youtu.be/PZBQzLfCKpw?t=1019
GIF App Development – Challenges and Tips
Honestly it might not. How many of these companies have - or will - simply get acquired then shut down? Or, exist as part of a larger operation a la Uber Eats and could eventually get shut down with little fanfare, or exist as a permanent loss leader?
> Software patents can exist, but are almost always unenforceable

Wanna take the risk? You might end-up winning the lawsuit, but at this moment, there's a good chance for you to be already out-of-business.
There's a reason these scammers choose gift cards as their preferred way to get your money: gift cards have become the easiest way to move large amounts of money while minimizing the chances of getting caught.

Every other business that deals with the transfer of money (banks, for example) is expected to put strong measures in place to make sure that the money is traceable and that they're not helping criminals. Why shouldn't large companies like Target be held to a similar standard?

Moreover, the incentives here are very worrying. Yes this guy got scammed out of $3k, but Target also got $3k in revenue. Without some sort of penalty/punishment, Target is incentivized to do the bare minimum to minimize their PR exposure (which they can do by saying "we take this very seriously and have adopted some new policies" but not really acting on it) but to otherwise allow this to keep happening. As the prevalence of these gift card scams has skyrocketed, so have gift card sales for these large companies.
A SETI Reality Check
Warren Buffett's long-standing position on market volatility is that he never worries about it or tries to time the market.

If he finds a deal and he believes that the fundamental value proposition is there, then he makes the purchase without regard to what might happen tomorrow.
Seriously. This is one of the most tired criticisms out there. It has existed since I got into technology 25 years ago. "Wow, you sure spent a lot of time doing that, and it's just a game!" -- Said most everyone in high school trying to get me to stop writing C code and hacking on my MUDs [edit: to do my actual school work]. Turns out it was pretty darn important I got into C and MUDs, without it I would not be in tech most likely :)

Person A: Look at this cool thing I did. Purely because I wanted to.

Person B: Wow you sure spent a lot of time on that. Surely you could be doing something more productive.

I find people that make this comment tend to not really understand or appreciate hacker "culture". We learn through experimentation and scratching itches. Maybe its not directly applicable to real world skills. Maybe it is. The process is what makes a good hacker. This person surely learned a lot about engineering and design in doing this project. Most importantly they wanted to do it.

Many people fill their time with bullshit on the Internet these days. I personally wonder what cool projects and other "pointless" things people could be creating if they weren't stuck on social media and consumed content.
Feels like friction would eat away a lot of electricity, no?
Working for a FAANG almost guarantees you will see yourself become the villain. But you will make the most money there, and probably have a fairly secure position.

A cloud consultant job (not at a FAANG, presumably) allows you to deliver the solution best for your customer, regardless of the source of the services.
I assumed that, with fallback, it still did some JVM->machine code translation, maybe I'm misunderstanding how it all works. Also, it still produces a native executable, which is more convenient to distribute than a jar.
"Treatments are better" very much means the area under the serious illness/death curve is smaller.

And deaths are a lagging indicator. It takes up to two weeks, median around one week to show symptoms, and then another two weeks, median a week and a half or so, to become seriously ill.

The outcome after that depends on predisposition and quality of care. But one developer I know spent forty days on a ventilator.

So if lockdown isn't being observed and masks aren't being worn, it's going to take 4-6 weeks for that to start significantly increasing deaths.

There are rumours in the UK of another national lockdown in September/October, but I suspect local lockdowns will become a thing long before then.
I've been spending the last couple of years doubling down on learning Swift, and the Swift ecosystem. It's been 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

And I haven't been paid a dime.

All the while, I have been told that I'm "wasting my time," "you should be learning React Native and Javascript," and that "Apple is a dead company." etc. ad nauseam

Since I've been hearing that same refrain (substitute "Windows" for "React Native," and "C" for "JavaScript") for the last 34 years, it doesn't phase me that much.

The simple fact of the matter is, I can afford to take the time to do it, I really like Swift, and I really like developing for Apple systems.

Maybe it will result in some kind of lucrative stuff; maybe not. I don't care.

I spent over 30 years, writing software that other people used as toilet paper. I'm doing what I want.

This guy is doing what he wants. Good on him.

One of the nice things about art, is that it is something other people enjoy; maybe, even more than we (the artists) do.

I think it's great.

I also enjoyed this[0], a couple of years ago.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1757088830996244
If I had a nickel for every programmer who thought their code was so good it didn't require comments... or thinks somehow that unit tests make up for comments... only to come back years later and have no idea why the logic is working how it is.
That's not the cohort I'm talking about--I'm not talking about age based cohorts.

The cohort I'm talking about is the number of days since a positive test result. When you have many new cases (loaves of fresh bread) and you use simple math, bread/moldy you get the wrong idea about death rate. Click-baity articles, and those with motivated reasoning for "it's just a flu" get breathlessly excited about this as if it were some sort of useful data. See ops assertion that the level of crisis "is independent of the number of people who test positive" for an example of what I mean.

People testing positive is a leading indicator for the size of the crisis.
I can’t wait. Conrad is into so many interesting things. A few years ago he gave a video talk to my local blockchain meetup.

The Quest is my favorite toy/leisure activity device. Can’t wait!