skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 3. When i went through YC (recently), we had a "masterclass" of sorts on growth with @patrickc
& @collision
. Once of the first questions they asked the group was "how many of you are consumer companies?"

> Like... 2 people raised their hands and everyone else laughed hysterically.

Are B2C inherently better than B2Bs? What's his argument here?

I, for one, was never one to enjoy B2C products (matter of fact, I think most of them are stupid), so I don't understand his disdain for everything not B2C
Reminds me that we used to have something similar in France a long time ago. Some websites came for free with your mobile plan. I think it was whatsapp and fb too?
https://outline.com/68BXAZ
Essentially yes, this is what my personal site is currently running(though it is empty as it stands, largely due to time constraints). Except I wrote it in Dart because I abhor javascript with a passion, even if the final output is still javascript.
But it doesn't link to any implementations as far as I can tell. It just asks you to hire Ferdio.
Quite similar to render.com or ?
Frankly I think Amazon has a even heavier design culture. The designs for a new project (e.g to be launched at reinvent) could go as long as more than half year.
I somewhat agree with you, but I remember how Steve Jobs said much the same thing to DropBox, but DropBox beats iCloud in nearly every way to this day.
So much hate in Hacker news I didn't know the community was this toxic. Interesting.
Revealed: Peter Thiel's Palantir secures £1m NHS coronavirus deal
> They are probably within the power, but they really don't care. It's cheaper and faster to build a few apartment blocks in a limited space (usually putting a strain on existing infrastructure — from water and sewage to roads to kindergartens and schools) than to invest in building out.

The reason we have gotten to this point is building out instead of up, sprawl instead of vertical expansion. Surely the solution is not more sprawl.
There is also the, rather terrifying, concept of focus from Vernon Vinge's Deepness in the Sky where brains are modified to turn people into intelligent single-purpose appliances/microservices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
My experience has been that writing the design doc is not as controversial, as much as the review process.

Does anyone have any insights on how to make the reviews more constructive + quicker?
Self-directed study is challenging, especially for 17 year-olds that don't have anyone (eg parents) who are in tune enough with autodidactism to guide them.

One of the biggest advantages of college for me was realizing how much there was to learn and how easy it was to do it (after skating through all of my schooling with straight As), and I only really refined my autodidactic abilities in my mid-20s.
Zoom has the same feature called Webinars
This might be a feature for some people, not a bug.
RDD works because talking is really powerful. Ever had to teach a class on something you thought you knew? The act of turning an amorphous blob of 'knowledge' into a linear presentation will often show you that you didn't understand things as well as you thought. The therapist's "Tell me more" forces you to tease out of the blob the distinct threads of the issue.

Journaling can also be useful in forcing you to produce words that describe what's going on, but it's also easier to slack off when there's nobody else in the room. If you worry about what you'll say in a therapy session, start writing and you'll likely come up with plenty to talk about.
Some people perceive them as "corporate" instead of "disruptive."
> I really wanted a push rather than pull architecture

Then try VictoriaMetrics - it supports both pull and push (including Influx line protocol) [1], it works out of the box and it requires lower amounts of CPU and RAM when working with big number of time series (aka high cardinality) [2].

[1] https://victoriametrics.github.io/#how-to-import-time-series...

[2] https://medium.com/@valyala/insert-benchmarks-with-inch-infl...
My knowledge is from consulting for fashion companies, so am not sure where to point you I'm afraid!

Most fashion retailers work with contract factories. They design a garment (or line of garments) and then put out a tender to a set of factories in their approved supplier list. The factories then bid to manufacture those garments. The decision-making criteria for the fashion companies vary but are usually some combination of quality on offer, price and 'time to store'/turnaround time. This tender process can happen dozens or hundreds of times a year for big, high turnover fast fashion retailers. Some of these retailers do have their own factories, but most don't.

The reason these retailers need to do this is because they're always trying to stay 'on trend' and have the latest, most fashionable items at the lowest cost. They're 'chasing the zeitgeist'.

Uniqlo, on the other hand, doesn't chase fashion in the same way. They have a stable set of core garments they always sell in predictable (and VERY large) quantities. This means they can negotiate longer term, much larger scale deals with manufacturers that work out MUCH cheaper for them. It also means they can go 'up the value chain' and manufacture the fabrics and patterns and tooling themselves, reducing cost even further.
Well, I myself have not seen any notebook as of late that satisfies my standards on build quality too.

I myself long time dreamed to build my own, fully custom, factory quality notebook, and possibly spin a small business around that.

Dell XPS has set a new high in laptop quality after a decade of boring, rebranded OEM designs, and Taiwanese cookie cutter engineering, but it is still not reaching the level of Japanese notebook brands before 2008.

I could've vouched for Panasonic, but they don't have 45W models. And despite their still excellent quality, they are not aiming at the power user demographics, like programmers.
Saarc COUNTRIES POPULATION 1955 2020
"The design is the code" does not follow from the idea that design and construction are not separate things in software.

The thing to take away from that idea is that the design doc is not law written in stone, but a base for changes. It keeps your design honest on the high level. If you end up clashing with reality, and your design doesn't work out, you can backtrack to the design doc and refine it as necessary.

In short, the design doc should be a living document.
Despite all the discussion about online classes, there is one fundamental aspect of online teaching, that isn't fully 'disrupted'

Keeping students attention on the class.

Technology may improve, economics may change, industries created and destroyed, but ultimately, if the students attention is not held, everything is lost.

In today's world, it has become extremely difficult to even keep focus, with the myriad of distractions abound.

I guess in the future, every city will have tens or even hundreds of virtual training centers, which are classes but taught online, by professors in far away universities. Students will gather here for the classroom experience, keep focus and still get quality education.

Perhaps a new idea of "Infrastructure as a service"

I wish that were true, and I am already seeing signs of that happening in India. Think of how much savings and ease it will bring to a students life, if they can have the convenience of going to college a few streets away combined with the advantage of learning from the greatest minds of humanity.
I don't think this is fair. I worked at Georgia tech during the mooc "revolution" and helped put on a physics course with a lab, something most thought was really impossible because labs are so hard with a classroom and now we just got rid of it. There were positives and negatives of what we generated, but at the end of the day it worked well enough. I am not exactly for online education nor do I agree it can replace on campus education. The problem is that there are many parts of being on campus that lead to success after you leave campus and also that keep you attending your degree. So it's almost an apples to oranges comparison.

I definitely agree with you on the gap year.
Founder Mentality
There are multiple pieces of documentation. Documenting what a method does is one of them, but primarily intended for maintainers of the system. Documenting its interface is meant for its users.

Both have great value, but at different times and to different people.
Does duration really measure depth of design?
Users aren’t customers. If you give something away for free, you will always have people clamoring for it rather than the paid product.

However people take what is free for granted and don’t consider it a part of the market. For instance, many hold that iOS is a monopoly despite being a minority of the market because you pay Apple for it, where as Android is just free and Google does not get your money for its use.
Really interesting.

I'm all about Approval voting, just vote for everybody who you would want as president, and whoever gets the most votes win. Want to vote for everybody? Go ahead!

Besides the spoiler effects listed in the article, voting has been made deliberately difficult in America. There is a deliberate effort to disenfranchise voters to keep things from changing. Anything that makes voting EASIER will create fairer elections, which neither party really wants unfortunately. Approval voting is the hardest for the voter to mess up, and therefore will likely be the fairest. You can screw up Ranked Choice. The Borda / Condorcet methods involve more complex math which can be screwed up. Approval voting is just simpler, which means your vote is more likely to be counted the way you meant for it to be.

This could, of course, be coupled with other measures that make voting easier. Instead of a single day, make it a month so that people can go around their work schedule and lines will be shorter.

In fact, in person voting is easier to scam than mail-in voting, so the fairest option would be to make mail-in voting very very easy. Print off your ballot online or pick one up at the post office or whatever, and send it in. When you vote in person, mistakes/hacking/etc are simpler because you can target a district that seems like it will skew a certain way. Mailed in votes should be scanned and counted and the anonymized scans should be made publicly available so the populace/press can verify the results themselves.

It won't happen because both parties have a vested interest in preventing it from happening. Fairer elections don't produce candidates like Trump and Biden.
> Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

In what areas? I see an industry with more and more consolidation. There is no longer the serious competition there once was in the field of office suites or certain kinds of creative software, which is really sad.
IMO it's too easy for competitors to create a similar level of functionality for it to be a standalone product.

If Slack charges too much, there's a host of free alternatives that can be used, meaning they have limited ability to increase prices.

Compare that to office suites. There's not that many options here and it's pretty difficult to build something that would have the functionality that enterprises think they want/need and compete with incumbants like MS.

The main free alternative (libreoffice) has had recent struggles with funding, due to the level of work needed to maintain and improve their offering
Same guys that on November 2nd, 2016, run a full page ad on the NYT [0], titled "Welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution", and signed "your friends at Slack".

How ironic.

[0]: https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft
This is absolutely terrible advice. There are a few professional services that can have a dramatic impact on the early success of a startup. You need the best PR firm you can get to return your calls. That ain't cheap, but it has a rather huge impact if used properly.
Great stuff! I'd love to use something like this at work.

Speaking of which, I work at a larger tech company, and the webapp we work on is quite large. How does/would Reploy handle a webapp that doesn't have a simple backend? i.e. the backend is distributed among many servers
>there are certainly bootcamp grads out there who have strong algorithm skills

Of course there are some, there's always outliers. Is that the norm though? Are Bootcamps focused on teaching algorithms?

The expectation for Bootcamp grads that are applying to junior dev jobs should be that they aren't experts in algorithms. That's what I stated in my comment. That's great if they have algorithm skills and want to apply to higher level roles, power to them.
Is anyone else bothered that every Java class file has the constant 0xCAFEBABE?
The difference is that ci-type of solutions might end up requiring maintenance for a million and one reasons. This won't and building it took me roughly the same amount of time it would take me to navigate through a ci-solution and test that I've set it up correctly(3 hours in total).
At least from my own experience, my own website is hosted on a simple $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet with a simple Flask backend that basically just converts Markdown to HTML and generates index pages and RSS and embed metadata and such. It's been completely fine with the surge of traffic from Hacker News; barely broke a sweat. CDNs only make sense imo if you're consistently having Hacker News levels of traffic.
FWIW, the vast majority of YC founders I've met have told me "It was good when I did it, but I don't know if I'd do it today. The batches are so big!"

I chalk it up to a pretty typical nostalgia. Everybody is biased towards thinking the experiences of their youth were perfect, and any change is detrimental.
Ok had a better look and this seems entirely focused on the dev experience, no plans for production hosting?
> Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting"

Zoom has the same features as the Webex Events in their zoom "Webinar", with separate logins for admins ("hosts") and panelists, q&a chat box etc.

Of course it's not free like Zoom meetings, but costs $300 or more - that's where they make their money... https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&from=webinar
I would love to play with a programming language that has a notion of an initialization phase, where constraints are relaxed. So often, especially in cli programs, you just want to set up some ambient state based on arguments or whatever that will be constant after you set it up. After setup, then it might be read by multiple threads, etc, and it's totally safe, except you could never convince a language like Rust that it is. Even a series of one-time copies into global "constants" would be sufficient to do the kinds of things I'm thinking about... require it to happen from `main` and (harder to do...) maybe don't let the user create threads until the switch is flipped. But don't put run-time checks on access or whatever... make it truly global and constant once initialization is over.
This is why Python is eating the world.

Whatever it is you're trying to do, there's usually already a library or framework ready and waiting for you to immediately import and start using.
Nothing is banned. This is a longstanding LEGO company policy that they were sort of stretching, until consumers called them out on it.
I think they're making the best of a bad situation ... not singing an entirely different tune.
Back in the day when online learning was channels on Community Antenna TeleVision systems reserved for Community Colleges, I was studying the digital bandwidth required for online learning via telecommunications.

Although I don't have a reference, I found a study by a German university that compared classes delivered by television with classes delivered with a combination of sound, pictures, graphics and text.

The result was that the latter was as effective as video for all categories of classes, even those teaching kinetic skills such as golf and tennis.

Moving pictures, especially those of the head and shoulders of a professor delivering a lecture, are completely unnecessary.

I think that the key to online learning is the care and expertise with which the content is developed, especially the narrative, pictures, graphics, and reference material, as well as the design and effective use of collaboration tools by the TAs and students.
> For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence.

I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison.

Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.
Was wondering why OP only seems to recommend reach-io as examples, turns out they are a contributor. It’s all open source so like, you’re not doing anything malicious for profit here, but it would come across as disingenuous if you didn’t mention being a contributor to the most prominently linked example system if this is supposed to be system agnostic documentation
Slack has created the blueprint of what to make. It’s much easier for MS to copy those features until the difference between the two products is small. I think Slack is hoping their focus will save them, but in the end they’re going to lose most of their MS oriented customers
This issue is related to slightly confusing _warnings_ that the software prints out, it doesn't effect the _correctness_ of the backups.

The warnings are produced by COPY TO, which is used by pg_dump, since COPY TO doesn't copy chunks. It is not an issue for pg_dump, since it also do COPY TO on each chunk table.

Timescale engineer here - was part of discussion about this warning. We need to do another round and see how to remove this confusion.
Looking up Zuby's antics, seems like he intentionally used "OK dude" to insult a transwoman. Misgendering people intentionally is hateful. Not sure where your confusion stems from.

This is after he tried to dismiss the legitimacy of trans people by way of entering a woman's weightlifting competition, claiming he identified as a woman while not out as trans. These dumbass shenanigans are consistently done by folks who "don't believe" in transpeople, or go the route of claiming they have a mental illness.

The rest of the world already cancelled transpeople before the phrase cancel culture existed. Give them a break already.
My last one is a rising sophomore, and I concur. In fact, he's taking a class this summer. I wish he were taking more- getting an extra semester out of this at home would have been shrewd.
Good point!

Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.

(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)

Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.
For 1: most people do not care about diseases that do not matter. Most people consider the common cold normal and acceptable. I was very sad such research never went very far, for I believe viruses are way more deadly that we think: as we know now that the EBV can cause many bad things long term, there is no reason to think other viruses can do the same. The fact that these 2 separate diseases are called the "kissing disease" (EBV) and the "common cold" (coronaviruses) gives a fake sense of safety. SARS was the perfect scare to get research started!

HOWEVER, most people do not care about viruses, and problems in general besides imminent danger. If you too care, realize we are in the minority. Before covid19, most people though the wearing of masks when one has a cold in asia was overkill. Even now, in the midst of a pandemic, the wearing of masks is a hard sell. I fully expect all basic precaution like transparent plastic sheets in front of the checkout to be gone as soon as the pandemic is over, because we are in the minority.

For most people, the experience of directly seeing the person doing their checkout is preferable to the alternatives. It makes them happier. It is not hard to expand that to other issues: even for a virus like Ebola, research doesn't get much money. Clearly, it means that at the population level, we just don't care.

2. Have you noticed how people play various games like Zynga, which accomplishes nothing? Just like videogames in general: unless you are being paid for playing (professional player), you are getting nothing out of it, except maybe better reflexes - but you could achieve the same result in much less time. Social networks are the same. What am I accomplishing here? Nothing. You could even say, as I often talk to people who reject my premises, HN makes me unhappy. Yet I post here?

So you must consider that what we consider make people, you or me unhappy is an oversimplification. We must gain something else out of this - maybe a dopamine hit?

Social networks are all in competition with eachother. You will prefer the one that gives you the best overall experience, the largest dopamine hit with the lowest unhappiness.

This social network increase overall happiness. There may be more than one: facebook for regular people, HN for hackers, Twitch for gamers, etc.

It's hard to overcome the fallacy of composition (the tendancy to extrapolate from our own experience to the population level): what makes us happy make make 50% of the people miserable, and vice-versa.
Well, even in such a world, that would still be considered trespassing.
Personally I don’t see a distinction between:

“God has always been”

and:

“Don’t ask what created god”

Either explanation dismisses outright the idea that we should even care what came before god, or what created him, etc.
These are nowhere near sweeping generalizations. I am making small hypothetical examples against the case "anyone who wants to die should immediately be able to do so". My aim is to show there are at least a few cases where this is not the case.

As for your questions. I actually think that sometimes doing things that hurt people is to be accepted. For example, sometimes (SOMETIMES, NOT ALWAYS, POSSIBLY EVEN RARELY) it is better to not allow someone to end their life. Similarly, sometimes it is better for someone to end their life even if that would hurt others.
That's my interpretation as well. They might have been planning to publish what neighborhood he lives in, for example.
I don't know think this is as clear. Can you link me to some researcher where a stronger social net leads to better entrepreneur outcomes?

Because looking at country level data, USA, with it's terribly scary and risky path of entrepreneurship completely outperforms welfare state countries like the Nordics.

You could say the difference is from capital markets, but still even the difference in startups that are not successes is humongous.
Smart but not wise.

Certainly another tool in the privacy toolkit if you absolutely must surrender your likeness to someone else’s computer, but worth bearing in mind that this does not provide (and doesn’t purport to provide) the kind of privacy that strong encryption (or better yet, absent data) can provide.

Edited to add: it’s still damn cool.
I have inherited old Java, PHP, and C# code bases with more than a thousand classes, lots of inheritance, and no composition. It can be so difficult to answer the question, "What happens when I call this method on this instance?" that a 10-min edit takes a full day. The code is basically frozen for fear of breaking something

At some point, you see enough of this that you realize the tool is more dangerous than helpful. The makers of Kotlin and many other newer languages seem to know this and have disabled inheritance as a default or left it out entirely.
It seems Boeing can't do anything anymore ( not a native speaker, sure there is a canonical way of saying this ).