skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a warning about cheap rice cookers...

About six months ago I bought a tiny $20 model Dash[1].

I've often heard people say that cheap rice cookers are just as good as expensive ones, and since I'm poor, live alone, and this was my first rice cooker, I thought it would be enough.

It turns out this rice cooker had a number of problems.

First, the screw that held in the pot lid on this rice cooker wasn't made of stainless steel, so it quickly rusted.

I could have gone to the trouble of going to the hardware store and picking out a perfectly matching stainless steel screw (if they had one), but I never bothered, so to this day I still lift the pot lid with a paperclip that I insert in to the hole where the pot lid used to be each time I want to lift out the lid. It's a little annoying, but I can live with it. I'm sure for some people not dealing with this annoyance would be worth paying more for a decently made rice cooker.

The second issue is that this ultra cheap rice cooker only makes enough rice for me to eat at a single sitting. As a single person that only very rarely has people over, this is enough.. or so I thought until I found that I'd rather cook extra rice ahead of time that I could eat throughout the week (or at least one day in advance), so I don't have to even bother with the rice cooker ever day. As simple as the rice cooker is, it's still a bit of a hassle to rinse the rice out, and fill the cooker with rice and water. I'd rather just microwave leftover rice, which is a bit simpler.

Third, the markings for the water level and the instructions for this model are just plain wrong and take experimenting to get the optimal levels. After some months of experimentation, I managed to perfect my technique, but it would have still been a lot less hassle to just have the thing make perfect rice from the beginning rather than having to fiddle with it so much.

So, because of these issues, in retrospect I wish I'd gone for a larger, inevitably more expensive rice cooker... and hopefully it would have been less annoying and fiddly from the start.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CHZP91L/
Credit reporting agencies and financial institutions commit fraud all the time. They call it identity theft so that you think it is your fault instead of their fault. No one would care about a bank giving a loan to a person that was impersonating them except for the fact that the bank (credit card, mattress store, car dealership, etc) commits fraud and reports to the credit agency that you have defaulted on your loan when you have not. Then the credit reporting agency also commits fraud when they sell this false and damaging information to others.

This is the big lie. That "identity theft" should be the problem of the person who was impersonated. Pass laws that heavily fine entities that give false information to credit bureaus and fine credit bureaus who give out false information. "Identity theft" would no longer be something that people would worry about.
Valneva's Initial Results for Phase 2 Study of Lyme Disease Vaccine Candidate
I did that from 2008 to 2014 (but I didn’t buy gold).

It worked out terribly. I should have parked it in a diversified portfolio. Instead, housing and equity prices inflated, and I lost a ton of potential gains.

Buying gold during the crisis would have made it even worse:

https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

If you must buy gold, it’s best to buy some when the stock market is booming. If you bought gold in 2011 or 1980, your current return would be 0%. It would have been very negative last year.
Assuming this was reposted 'automatically' you should have received an email from HN at the email associated with your HN account telling you that it was going to happen. At least I have received such emails in the past.
Facebook is shrinking in some countries, but globally it is still growing in both usage and activity. Check out their recent quarterly results.
Depends on the scale. For vanguard, it’s a lot of work.

For a financial advisor, the software to rebalance runs in a web browser on a laptop (heck, even an iPad!).

Rebalancing has been figured out and automated very well for a few years now, with several different vendors all competing.
My Cuckoo definitely has a brown rice setting. It works pretty well fwiw
Check bubble.io
Agreed on the observation about nothing for kids. I saw some, but even compared to Tokyo or Osaka, it was sparse.
I see that as the point in Trump’s timing. What other story is being ignoring by focusing on this?
Funny thing: in my job, I've calculated the relative survival rate of prostate cancer (the difference in mortality risk between people diagnosed and a similar population in age, sex, and race). Cause of death is not considered, only that there was a diagnosis (avoids complicate deaths and captures indirect influence). It'll often be that men diagnosed with prostate cancer have a better 5-year survival rate than men who did not receive a diagnosis. And that's after excluding non-invasive tumors.

Why? No definite idea right now. Possible correlation: a diagnosis happens when a man actively cares about his health (regularly brings up troubles with his primary care physician, asks for screening tests), which also implies he has the money to do so. This is also bolstered by the fact the survival stats don't include diagnoses at time of death. So it misses the guys who never got tested before it killed them.

By the way, if you look up the relative survival stats on the CDC's website, they won't show anything above 100% relative survival. Im short, they never let the added risk of death go below zero. Which is dumb, in my opinion. It's editing data because it violates the assumption the model is perfect.
I get the acute feeling that we're training medical doctors mainly in theory and giving them a very good understanding of human biology, but skipping the crucial step of training them to treat people. I myself had to see several professionals until figuring out my problems are mainly due to severe Vitamin D deficiency. A test that cost all of 30$ to do. It's hard to find someone who doesn't see you and immediately goes "You're under 50? It's stress. You're over 50? It's supposed to hurt, you're old. (My mother was told this, almost verbatim)". To put it another way, if I did my job, the way most doctors seem to do theirs, I would be out of a job. Every other professional is required to understand and practise customer relations, but doctors are somehow given a pass to be almost terminally dismissive of customer requests.
I've been patiently waiting on on update for this post and others on the Stackoverflow architecture and hardware on his blog. Nick, if you're reading this, we're dying for on updated post ;)
Teams is a flop? That's news to me.
Ordinarily, I'd say you want a product like Vanguard Managed Payout Fund. But they've just revamped them into the Vanguard Managed Allocation Fund (VPGDX): https://retirementincomejournal.com/article/vanguard-reboots...
I'm in the process of converting to emacs after about 6 years of vim - I find just having a daemon launch at startup and always having a frame open is fine once you get into the mindset of sending whatever you're editing to that frame instead of just editing it in the session you're in. I actually kind of prefer it now because when I used vim I never really took advantage of multiple buffers. I'd just open, edit and close.

One thing that's eluded me howver is being able to have graphical and terminal emacs work with the same daemon.
> The Rust library ecosystem has a history of traumatic library upgrades. The upgrade of libc from 0.1 to 0.2 is known as the "libcpocalypse".

Somebody should come up with a commonly-agreed-upon versioning scheme where we can indicate that breaking changes should be expected so people could avoid putting themselves in situations they regret.
> Their astronomical stock growth

Meanwhile, bond holders are asking for 4% more than similarly-size companies:

> This is remarkable data, Tesla’s five-year bonds are yielding nearly 400bps more than their possible market capitalization neighbors in the S&P 500.

* https://www.thebeartrapsreport.com/blog/2020/07/19/gaming-th...
dang talks about the "second chance" queue here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

Sometimes they see a post that didn't get attention, and so they re-up it. Usually, but not always, you get an email to let you know.
Apple Acquired Mobeewave, a Startup That Lets Smartphones Accept NFC Payments
Apple fights to not be forced to unlock phones, which is admirable, but they'll happily turn over your iCloud data.

To me the greater outrage is that the president can arbitrarily decide which apps citizens may or may not use. I would like to make that choice for myself, thank you very much.
Command-line options have conventions and so does the --help message. There are command-line parsing libraries where you specify your options and the help gets autogenerated. But I often wonder if a better approach would be to do the opposite? Ie write the --help screen (following usual conventions) and let the option parsing be generated from it by some library.
This looks awesome! Excited to give it a spin.

If I wanted to take a stab at a Scala SDK, is that something you would be interested in supporting, or should community/contrib SDKs be managed as separate projects/plugins?
I mean, yeah. Using the software you wrote on other machines is a big part of the software development experience.
I don’t know the original context, but I take a quote like that to be a reminder that there’s cost to preparation and you could go overboard.
The memoirs of Ian Smith worth a read if you have a spare time https://www.amazon.com/Great-Betrayal-Memoirs-Douglas-Smith/...

It wasn't just a personal betrayal but Rhodesia was left on its own too. Even though the UK was right with the NIBMAR policy maybe it could have been played out differently.

Also didn't help that the UK media was biased, but hey that's nothing new under the sun just seeing the same in 2020. The old Thames TV reports are all on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8qyYFNOBhQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3u5CxS3j5M

Good luck to Zimbabwe, but wish you were not in a bed with China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Zimbabwe_relatio...
the problem with real estate is that it's work. Even if you hire a management company (which does hit your profit), shit like bad tenants can really screw you up, if only in term of time spent on paperwork and legal garbage. In the best case scenario it's low (but not zero) work, but in the worse case it's a LOT of work.
Two-pizzas teams.
WHO reports nearly 300k new Covid-19 cases worldwide, largest single-day rise
For an individual ISP, yeah. But there are thousands across the US and what I think doesn’t exist is a central list they all look at for IPs to block.
An observation someone made before the recent Q2 results were announced:

> They will almost certainly make a profit [this quarter]. Last year they lost $400 MM in Q2. This year they sold almost exactly the same number of cars. They sold them at lower prices. They operated two car factories instead of one, which drives up fixed costs. There is no reason they should genuinely do better this year than last. But, since we are all willing to be blind to this obvious book cooking, they will, for sure, announce a profit.

* https://www.thebeartrapsreport.com/blog/2020/07/19/gaming-th...
So, no cloud, no AWS. All in house?
Misdiagnosis is a problem -- and one that hopefully technology will help us address further -- but what I'm saying is that misdiagnosis would in aggregate be much higher if people did it themselves. Its a common joke that first-year medical residents will diagnose everyone with everything. Second opinions, to your point, help mitigate the issue, but we have to look at the population level.

I'm very sorry for what happened to your father, and your family. The fact is that you wouldn't have known to look for bone cancer in the specific situation after skimming the medical manual unless you had proper training and experience. In retrospect, the symptoms fit, but they fit the original diagnosis too. And the original diagnosis was far more likely. Diagnostics is as much art as it is science, every single human is different -- to the extent internal anatomy often looks absolutely nothing like textbooks and varies hugely from person to person. [1]

And yes, in aggregate, experience with thousands of bodies is far more valuable than experience with just your own.

We must find ways to be better at this, I just don't think DIY will get us there.

[1] https://sciencenorway.no/blood-community-medicine-forskningn...
The Text Editor Sam
Yeah I wish people would account for this when making statements. What is the incidence of cancer death in 50-year-olds then vs now.
> Most of the knowledge transfers just fine between languages.

A rather low-level example (nothing like understanding good abstraction/design), but useful because it's apparently not obvious - co-workers didn't believe it until I demonstrated with short example programs: Reference semantics are identical between javascript, python, and java.

(The first two being the primary languages we use, I don't remember how java came up that day - I know others are also the same)
Does Joining the S&P 500 Index Hurt Firms?
Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation
> Failing to provide top notch healthcare to a country’s citizens is a much less grave offense than outright murdering millions of citizens to protect or extend one’s political power.

It's fair to say it's not as bad as doing it for political power, but it's worth noting that in the U.S. aprox. 45000 people a year die due to lack of adequate healthcare. Over the past 4-6 decades, it indeed ads up to millions dead.

This state of things is directly attributable to law makers being lobbied by corporate interests. Practically every other developed nation has some form of universal healthcare. We can add a large number of those that died from the current pandemic, since quite visibly the countries with universal healthcare did much better.

Your argument essentially seems to be that it's way better for private interests to influence public policy in a negative way than having the state enacting terrible policies by itself.

I agree that it makes it more distributed, but still terrible. And yes, it is capitalism. You cannot just take the good parts and disregard the bad.

> I understand and appreciate your goal of trying to draw attention to America’s own faults, trying to make the comparison with China has the opposite effect. The US is already incomparably better than China.

This is my main issue with your argument. Sure, China is still worse, I acknowledge that, my argument is that the U.S. is not as much better as many, including you, probably think.

You have a much more direct impact on the U.S. and making it better than you have on China. Diluting yourself into thinking the U.S. is already essentially "the good guys" prevents you from having the will to actively improve it and over time leads to the fact of it being not as far from China as you'd like.

The world already thinks of America as the bigger threat to world peace, you can keep telling yourself what you want, but the rest of the world has a much less rosy picture of the U.S. than you'd think and the best way to keep China from "taking over" is not to ban TikTok but to work hard to improve that image.
Analyzing Cold Start Latency of AWS Lambda
Yeah, it's been our experience that getting any doctor to take breast and uterus conditions seriously, especially with symptoms that can't be empirically measured, is a nightmare.

My partner spent most of their months living with this tumor feeling like they were being stabbed to death every 20 to 30 minutes, between the torsioning and it getting pinned against their uterine walls. It should not have taken a third opinion to say, hey, maybe you _do_ need imaging done after all to confirm that your level of pain isn't in fact normal for a UTI that they don't have, or periods that they weren't having at that point of their cycle.

My partner also should never have had to switch to a menstrual cup so they could measure their own period blood loss across months, just make their own case that 80-100mL of blood lost _per day_, not per period, isn't "heavy but normal".
Plus, the massive number of the elderly working in difficult or dangerous jobs like taxi drivers, janitors, cleaners at food courts. Very strange and somehow felt like an unkind system for people who are not “productive”
I was also invested heavily and still am a little bit even if my usage is decreasing.

Wow I loved instagram, first the filters that made people try to be artsy managing to distract people from the fact that early phone cameras had terrible quality.

Then there were stories, while unfortunately ripped off Snapchat, they did a great job with it and it fit right in with the image first social network. People started posting stuff simpler than the perfect life of their feed.

When people started complaining about tons of ads, I didn't have them, I quickly discovered I was in some AB test, eventually they probably saw how ads were perfoming well now we all have them, holy shit its a lot of ads.

Now its a cesspool of ads, marketing, activism, they moved the notifications tab out of the navigation bar to have space for a shopping tab, people are marketing their hustles, trying to build up personal brands, its so used that businesses almost require an instagram presence, signal to noise ratio is getting worse by the hour.

I still use it quite a bit because it helps me keep up with lots of people from back home and other places I've lived but as it floods with ads people share less and less personal stuff to, feels like a post-social media age is going to come eventually.
There's also a possibility of (hyper) inflation. I would buy certain hand picked large stocks, Bitcoin, gold and Fx.
I'm asking you to provide a very clear and defintive way to measure what you are describing, as in provide sources for your claims, which would be along the lines of 'on x date poster Y made this post and as a DIRECT result of this event this favourable action took place.' Its very simple to explain, but a lot harder to understand from my position to see how exactly this takes place without this. Because I can draw a straight line from the DHS being booted after people did this [1].

That's what 65 days of continual activist protests did, that then resumed as peaceful demonstrations for their cause only AFTER the DHS left. This could be seen in other other BLM protest in major cities, that were escalated because of Police.

> sealioned...

I don't even know what that means, but I fear this is the typical reaction when someone is confronted with trying to substantiate such a bold claim and cannot really do so, that is start to try and deviate from the points made with entirely irrelevant sensationalism. I asked you to provide substantial evidence for your claim.

1:
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/portland-pro...
ah! I wish I was this clever--sadly, I am just bad at writing...
For more on S&P, an interview with one of the committee members:

> Today on the Rational Reminder Podcast we have joining us Dr. David Blitzer who is the Managing Director and Chairman of the S&P Dow Jones index committee. He has been there from the time when indexes were barely even being traded and the first time S&P Futures began trading, and since then, indexing has turned into the massive phenomenon we all know today. Indeed, S&P indexes were (and still is) at the center of this explosion. Today Dr. Blitzer talks to us about the early days of indexing and shares some of his ideas about why indexing became so popular. We also discuss the possible reasons why some people still choose actively managed funds and the effect that the abundance of research has had on their dwindling appeal. Ever wondered where the rapid growth in indexing will end up? What happens after indexing? Can indexing become too big? Be sure to join us for this masterclass on indexing!

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/54

Blitzer recently retired:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Blitzer
This is awesome! I was looking for something to teach children programming with. (10-12 years onwards)

Your project looks amazing. I hope I can find ways to contribute.
Banning TikTok violates the rights of Americans who use the platform, and also Americans who work there.

More generally, violating one right of one American threatens all rights of all Americans.

TikTok should be banned if and only if it presents a military or intelligence threat.
Which part do you disagree with? The fact that the products are beloved, or the fact that people are working to improve them?
So will they be keeping all the intrusive spyware features as a part of this deal?
It depends on the purpose of the program. If the purpose is to recruit even more, then they shouldn’t be included because they are already over-represented. Many of the minority-focused programs are about recruitment and increasing the pipeline.
"easy to copy" isn't really a factor here tbh, seeing how tiktok (along with vine, snap, facebook, etc) is a classic example of network effects.
That’s two companies. Granted, they collect a larger proportion of revenues than many others within the NYSE.

The market overall is not healthy. As long term unemployment continues more and more people will hang on to their iPhones or cancel their amazon prime.

Those two companies, as well as Google, will be relatively protected during this period. The rest of the market hasn’t been truly exposed to the macroeconomic effects that COVID-19 will bring us in this country.
Is stackoverflow essentially a monolith? I remember reading about the single database setup several years ago, I'm surprised that they have been able to keep scaling vertically.
Wow. 1M. That's so many. Why not start with one. Go check who represented the Palestinians in the 1st summit. I'm waiting...
Making the US less open will not make China more open.
The S&P Dow Jones and S&P 500: A Brief History and Interview
Whatever. There's a big difference between feeling inadequate while sitting in your third vacation home and working 40-60 hours a week at a job you hate because if you were doing what you actually wanted to do instead you'd be starving in a ditch somewhere by now.
I think "book cooking" is a bit exaggerated.

They received a larger amount of government incentives, and more cars sold means more software sold (autopilot, etc), which has huge margins.

That's, in my humble view, the main reason why they managed to make a profit, despite the larger capex you have mentioned.

I'm not a Tesla fanboy but I have to admit that, besides the currently hyped stock price, I think it's a company that will do well in the long run.
Not that it justifies our behavior, but I can’t help but cringe a bit when considering how China locks American companies out of its market but expects better access for Chinese companies in the American market. America-Chinese relations started
going downhill in 2009 when China thought it prudent to start blocking most Americans services, America just took a decade to follow up with similar bad behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957%E2%80%931958_influenza_pa...

"About 70,000 to 116,000 people died in the United States"

"The second wave, in January and February 1958, was more pronounced among elderly people and so was more fatal."

There have been over 150,000 deaths in the US in the first 7 months of the current pandemic. So no, you're incorrect.
In the 2000 crash, VTSAX came back about a year before the S&P 500 did.

source: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...

see the drawdowns tab.