skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They have research and product teams that work to understand the target market/country/culture and build products for the target audience

Isn't that making the same point I made: local knowledge matters.
Most companies do a very poor job of accurately measuring employee productivity/output on an individual basis. It seems to me that “40 hours per week” made sense for physical jobs where output was a multiple of hours worked, and then was adopted by newer firms as a low friction, culturally accepted placeholder for “give us your best effort and don’t have another full time job at the same time”.
Why One Dangerous Mosquito Developed a Taste for Human Blood
The sliders on the site work for me in Firefox, v78.0.2.
Visual Cliff
The format doesn't have any set limit. Rather, it's implementations that set a limit. Ruby's standard JSON parser returns values of class Integer for integers in the JSON.
Thanks for the data point. Yeah to be honest we do really well with very tight-knit teams right now. Cofounders are generally already good friends.
But the outcome isn't the same for the company.

I go to lunch, and chat with co-workers. They tell me about their project and I tell them about mine.

Then I get a requirement that I have to build something that interacts with their project and I have a rough idea of how it works because we've been talking about it a little bit. So instead of starting from nothing I'm starting from some knowledge.

Even though that part of the conversation was 10 min of a 30 min conversation there are useful parts that happen in the office.

I've been trying to replicate that at home more.
Yep. Couldn't agree more. This reads like a group of co-founders and all their mates/YC cohorts saying how great a product is because they want it to be a great idea so bad.
Delay Line Memory
> Regular people didn't but PCs in 2000 that's just not true.

Sorry I've got no idea what this means.
Yes that's really helpful. As a software engineer by trade, I totally understand wanting to maintain flow.

Someone else in the thread talked about how to find the balance between what's most productive for you and what's most productive for the team. I think that's going to be key for our users as well.
If people were willing to compromise then it wouldn't have become a political issue to begin with.
> Anyone else is fine.

Even Qualcomm?
I have developed this API to help me with a project I was working some time ago. I'm now opening it for people to try it out and seeing if it is helpful. This API can classify words (up to 10 at a time) by its Part of Speech. Let me know what you think.
I dunno if they can necessarily do a better or cheaper job. A lot of the engineers at these megacorps are super burned out 9-to-5ers who don't particularly care about what they're doing, since it won't have that big an impact on their lives one way or the other if it succeeds. ("Woo, 20% bonus this year" vs "Team's being reorged, gotta hit up leetcode and find another corporate job")
> the First Sale doctrine

Isn't that the exact thing they'd be referring to?
I have experienced this lifecycle many times:

1. Ah, we’re using the database as a queue.

2. Database is running hot, I wonder where all the load is coming from?

3. Oh, it’s all the queue tables.

It’s not even a scale/load issue. Even at smaller scales you’re introducing some major lock contention.
I love old Best Sellers. Don't think that article was real helpful in listing any.

For example, pretty much everything by Michener is amazing, but nobody cares about him any more. He's dismissed as some kind of trashy or middlebrow post WW-2 writer; maybe he was -but he's also almost always a lot of fun to read, and occasionally incredibly interesting.

The Bjorndal Saga by Trygve Gulbranssen is largely forgotten in the US (maybe less so in Norway), but won all kinds of presidential awards and was a big deal in its day. It's sort of like "The Leopard" which is less forgotten, since they made a decent movie out of it (probably the great Italian novel). Greater novel though, in my opinion.

Another one I picked up because of an interview with Jim Simons; Jan de Hartog's "the Captain" -so far so good; was a big deal back in its day; it's predecessor "Captain Jan" was important enough it figured into Holland's war story. Totally forgotten now in the anglosphere anyway, and I'd have never heard of it if it weren't for a one off statement by an important guy who could hardly remember the name himself.

Dennis Wheatley is another huge best seller from the Ian Fleming era of trash novels; loads of fun to read -vastly better than Fleming. Alas, the movies they made of his books were all "video nasties" rather than James Bond.

None of these are Nobel Prize in Literature tier books, they vary wildly in quality, but they're loads of fun to read now as they were back then. Books don't always need to be an exercise in self improvement.
Show HN: Greph – Scraping from Your Terminal
Give it try scraping from your terminal.
I know. I was being sarcastic. I’m the same way, and I’m pretty sure my strava is set to private. Mine was more of a comment on how everything has a social component nowadays.
This cuts both ways; your ability to demand higher pay is contingent on that you can get that pay elsewhere. If other companies at your new LocalRate are paying substantially less, then your remote employer only has to beat those offers to remain competitive (from your point of view).
The economics of IPO investing seem to reward the early private investors at the expense of retail investors. In the current market, I question this as an investment strategy.

"Oh no, I missed the IPO" turns into "well, at least I can buy at a discount" 6 months later. This isn't every company, but it's been an increasing portion as of recent years.
Google, rise to the challenge and defend this court case using your chat bots please. Start with your YouTube spokesdroid to test the water.
Panthera-Jekyll
PBKDF is (at best) a sub-optimal choice: their entire business model is zero-knowledge storage of cryptographic secrets. They really need to switch to Argon2 and some sort of PAKE protocol.

However, they need a cross platform solution that integrates with .NET and will also work on a budget smartphone. I've sketched out such an architecture, but I lack the time and budget to do it.
One example would be to join groups that you don't want associated with your IRL identity. Another would be as part of a phish test while doing a pentest against an organization you're working for.

Or... a bazillion other illegitimate reasons ;).
Luckily there are several keyboards you can use instead that are better that the stock keyboard anyway.
The person does the same amount of work at home that they do in the office, because when being in an office there is a normal background level of distraction, socializing, breaks etc that interfere with the person’s work, causing them to only be productive for 5 of the 8 hours. But those “unproductive” hours were paid as part of the expected 40. They are still in essence paid as part of the 40. This person’s output for the company is the same (if not better). Lost time from friction caused by office life is restored. BUT spending that restored time on work can be suboptimal. Eg if I push too fast, I sometimes make subtle mistakes that are time consuming to undo. Or I get out of step with coworkers and have to find a way to cool my heels anyway. People are positive about this because the worker is happier and more effective at the job, whilst reclaiming some hours, and contributing at the same level as always, which deep down is what the company is buying with their forty hours - a certain contribution of work per week.
I actually almost never use ATMs, anymore (I use Apple Pay, as much as possible, and plastic, for the rare times it is not accepted). I've had the same five-dollar bill in my wallet for a month. The place that I tended to use ATMs, was when I went to Tokyo, and they are definitely not free, there.
Stripe is keeping my refund fees for OLD transactions
Like others here, I had been grandfathered into Stripe's original pricing terms, but it suddenly came to an end with a generic email announcing the termination of this plan within 30 days in early March.

While I was able to get them to push the transition to Sept 1 due to COVID, I still have a lot of existing transactions, including from pre-March, that could be refunded, since I am in the travel booking business where the service isn't rendered until months away and many trip have been postponed to later this year or 2021.

Stripe thinks it's ok to unilaterally change pricing terms and retroactively apply to older transactions. I strongly disagree. Isn't this unethical if not illegal??

Losing the transaction fees on refunds could make the difference in whether our travel company survives this pandemic, and I need the fees returned so I can pay the customer their 100% refund they deserve (per our terms with them).

I want to switch to Square or another payment processor that still returns transaction fees for refunds, but Stripe should still do the right thing and abide by the original terms at the time of the transaction. And offering a future credit isn't sufficient since it keeps me hostage on their platform and makes it challenging to issues the full refunds to the customer.
I always keep our leases short because you never know what the future brings. I'd hate to be locked to a five or 10 year contract. Sure, I don't get the best rates. But that flexibility has paid off more than once.

You're right about the events/conventions business, that's been more or less killed for the foreseeable future. I know someone that organized a few of them every year and it's not a pretty picture.
Woops, forgot the major issue-- the Pi Zero only has one USB port (the other is just for power), so you couldn't get video frames in at the same time as you pretended to be a keyboard.
> it’s too expensive.

Can you identify a time when cost was obviously a signifcant factor in a military choice? To me it seems that cost is low in the grand scheme of things.
Robo/FX was another graphical BBS that came out in the early 90s. I remember migrating from RemoteAccess to Robo/FX; it was quite the change from ansi art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX
https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/5eo8pz/roboboard_and_r...
Agree C-level is where the most easily accessible power resides, but when banded together employees also do have lots of power and can push for things. Hence there's still value of discussion in companies around these ideas.
Terrible but you're enabling it.
Should the web archive organisation be legally separated from the lending library, to protect Internet history in the event of losing the lending library lawsuit?
But what are you sacrificing in return for your “perseverance”?

Very few people tend to look at the mind as a system, and also seem to ignore that depression, anxiety, panic disorders, etc. happen for a reason. The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological satisfaction that they seek. Their mind has predicted the conclusion of their efforts, and the conclusion lies far below what they seek. Thus the mind desperately attempts to re-understand, re-configure, and re-model the world to achieve its goals.

But instead what is espoused by modern psychology and self-help is a kind of blind optimism or a horse blinders kind of approach to tending one’s mind. Most types of meditative studies also force this notion of blindness. Depression and anxiety and other “disorders” (whose classification from its onset is very unhelpful for its ideological integration into society as a valid problem to work through) most often happen to those who are sensitive, those who have surprisingly extensive models of the world, etc.

But it has become very fashionable in SV intelligentsia and the communities that drink the intelligence soup that trickles down from the SV community (like other cities of America or other America-directed tech communities) to treat the mind as a dumb system that did a poor job evolving to a modern environment (e.g. rationality movement). Instead of understanding the mind (and consequently the body) as a system and listening to whatever small traces your mind has left in its great attempt to solve really important problems for you, we just blind ourselves to faux goals that we may not even actually want.

Optimization for optimization’s sake is bad, but goal-seeking for goal-seeking’s sake may be a significantly worse and dangerous meme.
Has that actually happened to anyone? I can think of a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have made contributions to the public debates relevant to their profession, and I've never heard of anyone being formally disciplined for expressing doubt about the science behind the DSM-5, or expressing concern about underdiagnosis/overdiagnosis, underprescribing/overprescribing, etc. (See for example CEP-UK [1] and the Critical Psychiatry Network [2] – many of the opinions of their members are rather unpopular with their peers, yet their members are still allowed to practice.)

If some crank misuses a professional's comments to justify their crank views, that's not the professional's fault, and I've never heard of a professional being disciplined for that.

[1] http://cepuk.org

[2] https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk
From my own attempts at hobbyist 3d modelling, computer generating a human with clothes is far harder than furniture. Looking through the computer generated images for IKEA almost all of them are hard body (solid objects) with very few soft objects (clothing, tablecloths, etc) and nothing that is alive. Creating realistic clothing renders is quite difficult, and it gets even more difficult when a lifelike human needs to be rendered as well.
Show HN: No Paint
Hi, I've been working on this app about making a painting for a few months now and we have just released a new update: (https://nopaint.art)

I added commands with parameters you can access by tapping or clicking the grey bar below the No and Paint buttons. You can also use the arrow keys Left and Right for "No" and "Paint".

Since launch we have grown a nice Discord community and have been appreciating some ideas and contributions from users. I'm not really sure what we will do next! Would love to hear people's thoughts.
I think I understand the point you’re making and I agree that there can be some synergy that comes from working together in person but it can also go the other way. Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale.

Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.
Lots of people will start with Amazon when shopping. It's definitely a threat to Google because those are some of the most valuable searches.
TSMC can't produce nearly enough chips to fill the demand.

Had TSMC seen Intel's problems early, they might have been able to build more fabs to put more pressure on Intel.
I'm not sure I agree. From what I remember manufacturing is a big part of Intel's profits. Sure, they might not have the best process, but they still have _a_ process, and customers are willing to pay for it.
>As I said before, that's a difference in a million potential deaths in the United States.

So? In the larger scale is not a big number and doesn't justify the lockdown
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

"full lockdowns and widespread testing were not associated with reduced COVID-19 mortality"

>. In addition you presented that 0.04% as somehow in agreement with the estimates

Yes the estimates 0.65, the number right now is 0.04, its a lot better, its good news.
FOSS and Crafts episode 2: The impact of machines that “learn” and produce
Sounds noble but if google are at the helm then that's the opposite of what I want.

I'm not Amazons biggest fan but Google are the last people on earth I'd want to have my purchase history.

Yeah they look all corporate good with their no commission / seller first attitude but it's just another data harvesting excersize & I'd rather not buy at all than buy through Google for 'free'.
Thoughts on crypt.ee?
I think you misunderstand my concern. What I'm missing in the above scenario is that a resource that should be 100% under the control of the customer and nobody else can be accessed by AWS personnel to open up a door that should be closed unless the customer permits access.

What the technical implications are is moot, the process that hands out these credentials should not be accessible to anybody but the customer. It implies that AWS personnel can impersonate customer representatives or processes run on behalf of those customers. That's a serious problem.

In all the years that I've been co-locating I do not remember a single instance where a representative of the hosting facilities that I've used gained access to our data or hardware without my very explicit permission.

As for audit logs: they are only as useful as those inspecting them, and more often than not are entirely passive until required for evidentiary purposes.
People are paid to be available to do 40 hours a week of work, not to actually do 40 hours of work a week. Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start etc still counts as work because you’re on the companies time not your own.

That’s also where the expectation to go above and beyond comes from. In many office environments actually getting stuff done requires time outside of normal business hours. Paychecks are about hours, promotions are about accomplishing something.
Regardless of one's views on Rails (not a fan, personally), I think we can all agree that there is plenty of room to criticize it without using ableist slurs.
Here are a couple of requests for integrating hw-probe if anyone wants to work on them:

https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/1454
https://bugs.debian.org/964853
Paid salary, work hourly? There's no sense in that for the employee.

Get your work done. That's what Salary used to, and should mean. Takes you 20? Good. Takes you 60? Too bad; get it done.
There's been a lot of these lawsuits recently but I haven't heard anything about them being successful.
>So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?

No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.

>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.

Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.

Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.
Isn't there another issue in that AMD's processors may be better (for some value of better obviously) but their software and sales is not?

It's anecdotal but I don't think I've ever seen any HPC documentation or case studies go anywhere near AMD tooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647031 contains a discussion of this - I've never needed to do that kind of work on an AMD CPU, so I couldn't comment myself).
Arthur C. Clarke predicted that by the year 2000 cities as we know them would no longer exist all the way back in 1964 [1]. We would live in a world of instant communication where we could contact anyone on Earth without leaving our home. This technology would make it possible for many people to conduct business without having to be present at a specific physical location. Today, we know the technology Clarke was talking about as the Internet. And while his technological predictions could not have been more correct, he severely underestimated the pace of social progress.

Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them.

Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study [2] shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results, but rather learn from it.

As we start coming out of the pandemic, workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&t=294

[2]: https://www.docdroid.net/vhPmnxg/valoir-report-the-real-prod...
Well, some countries already created legislation to settle the issue (Public Lending Right)

In Germany for example, libraries pay a few cents (~3-4) every time they lend out one of their books / films / etc. AFAIK this is also true for digital copies which are also limited to the number of licenses the library acquired.
Using GPT-3 to help write SQL Queries
> I absolutely love the basic idea behind Ceasefire.

Maybe you can explain what the basic idea is, because I have no idea.
For me, as an NYC resident, my apartment is small, most of my friends have left the city, none of my usual hangouts are open, and life is utterly monotonous. My wife was laid off and was in a field annihilated by the pandemic.

Every day is the same.

Worse, we've already had the damn disease, and it was utterly mild if it's the one I'm thinking of (testing was hard to get when I got sick so we took antibody tests later).

So I'm having the joy sucked out of my life to protect me from catching a disease I already caught.
Bugs and 0days aside, is not the writer's main issue here a communication problem with the Tor project?