skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What Will You Build?
A thread to take a break from politics or criticism of megacorps to shift to builder mindset.

You are given 50k USD seed round and 270 days to build 1 Million USD ARR business. What will you build?

Post below your idea and how will you scale the business from 1 employee (yourself) to potential 1 + n ( n >= 0) employees.
Was the second, more distant object (a combat chopper?), shooting a prototype particle accelerator to mess up with the base and test their readiness?
> Linux had a pretty strong amateur game scene back in the day before Steam came along.

It's wonderful that Linux has a huge collection of games these days, and it's even more impressive how far Linux has come with respect to native games and the ability to run Windows games.

That being said, I often find myself missing the amateur game scene. There used to be a lot of unique games and games with a different take on more popular titles.
The GP didn't reference Google Search Console. They mentioned their site's position on their microtargeted search results.

Which is a worthless metric since it won't be the same depending on a user's preferences, history, or location. It may be that their site averages as the top hit for a term but that's not the same as saying it's the top or second hit.

They're making claims about Medium's SEO chops with a metric that doesn't back up the claim.
Not in most cases, since 2018.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/card-surcharge-ban-means-...
Nothing off the top of my head. The way I really got monads was just writing Haskell code. It's one of the very few programming languages with a clear denotational semantics for everything (as a result of being pure), and you end up with lots of simple problems like "how do I keep this value around and 'mutate' it" that are conveniently addressed by a monad like the State monad.
While I recognize the convenience and price savings of shopping online at Amazon, the reality is that once charming bookstores disappear, people won’t even know what they’re missing to be able to ascribe a value to it. It’s about wanting a world that has a distributed power scheme (healthily decentralized), a marketplace of ideas (rather than only what Amazon platforms/sells), value placed on knowledge (books), spaces for subcultures to thrive, spaces for people in communities to interact with each other, etc.

Bookshops are just one example of what we are losing to megacorps for whom anti trust action is long overdue.
Chairs need a failsafe mode. This is what I call better design.

Recently my father sat on a chair that collapsed underneath him. It was a seemingly okay teak garden chair that had been recently in service and offered up to important guests. So in that way it was good that it was him rather than his brother in law or elderly neighbour that received a bruised elbow.

This got me thinking about the safety of chairs. This chair - a folding chair - really should have included a wire around the seat so that it had a failsafe mode in order to prevent complete failure once the wood of the seat eventually gave up.

There should be proper testing of seats to see if they are fit for purpose. Car seats for babies can't be passed on because there could be some crack in the polystyrene, yet regular chairs have no standards for safety. It is not a big deal until such time as you see a valued relative come a cropper.

Design is how it works and chairs are not designed to have a failsafe aspect to the design.
> Writen by 3-time Oscar winner, no less!

Sorry, what? Their About page is blank.
Looks like a worthy competitor of Moller Skycar /s
> do you have any thoughts on what causes these systems to stick to trains?

Trains are excellent for dense urban environments and better yet when integrated with another modes. I take Berlin as an example: You have fare zones and S/U-Bahn everywhere in the city center extending for to Potsdam, etc., trams in the former east, buses on the less dense parts of the city. Also trivial access to regional and long-distance trains. And it also disproves the typical excuse "You can't do that in an old city": some U-Bahn lines exists since 1902, the city got devastated by war and then there was the DDR. The reunification needed a lot of work and yet the system survived. Took me a long time to notice there was no Ubers, maybe because it was not that advantageous for people to use it and Uber Inc. just gave up instead of fighting city regulations, as they did everywhere).

I compare with the systems from my native Brazil, where public transportation ranges from pathetic inefficient on big cities to non-existent in small towns. Hell, I really miss Berlin.
My monitor when turned off, is also not black black. So the blackest black possible on my screen is around the same color as these other black things.
rustc was the first (and currently only) compiler I ever contributed to. I think many people in the Rust community are that way. IMO the way they introduce new people to compiler development is top notch. Yes, some algorithms are extremely complicated, like how match statements are translated, but for most changes, you don't need to touch these areas. A lot of compiler engineering is "just" straightforward implementations of papers (like rustc's float parsing bases on a paper), or even simpler, shoveling data from one place to another, and doing that in a multi hundred kloc codebase. It's not trivial, but certainly not magic either.

For the future I hope that some of the custom things that the compiler requires (x.py build system, nightly RUSTC_BOOTSTRAP hack, etc) will be reduced to the needed minimum to make it easier for people from the wider rust community to jump into development, but they have already adjusted many things to rust customs, like introducing Cargo.toml, linking between compiler crates through Cargo.toml instead of just doing extern crate, gradually replacing rustc_serialize with more standard things, etc.
Maybe I should have asked for a single example in the West where sexual and mental child molesting is legal and/or is not actively criminally prosecuted.

But at least it is very clear that we could only find a rare example against systematic rape of under aged girls in other societies.

15 million girls a year marry before the age of 18.
Should we make it artificially profitable to recycle? Recycling is often resource-intensive, we need to be careful we don't create a system in which we're using more energy and resources to recycle just to make ourselves feel good.

It's quite possible that throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved and raw resources become more scarce might be the best way to go. This cycle has already occurred with old electronics (companies are successfully mining garbage dumps for the gold connectors and traces).
> If you do billions of requests/s I bet you don't care that requests fail? You probably can't even see that requests are failing because you'd have no logging, too expensive at this scale.

That's an assumption. Our customers care a lot. And we have sufficient monitoring in place.
All recommendations I provided above where about maximizing availability, and provided based on the experiencing of improving the experience for lots of users.

> I do financial systems, most load typically doesn't go above 1k/s, but every request matters because a dropped request is a dropped payment, possibly tens of millions of dollars lost!

Without knowing much more about your system: If you are losing that amount of money for failed requests (which can e.g. happen due to random network blips) you are doing something wrong. You should invest into different strategies than increasing timeouts.
Are you sure about this? From what I gather the current ruling dispensation in India is opposite of left, and Jack Dorsey has stated in the past about Twitter having left leaning bias. [1] Might not translate to their India operations but I strongly doubt it wouldn't.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/19/twitter...
I think you said something silly and I said as such. I don't think it's disrespectful to give my honest opinion on a statement, or to call something I see as silly silly. I never said you were a bad person for thinking these things, just that your statements do not mesh at all with my understanding of reality or, frankly, the widely understood differences between US and Saudi life.

Just a small note, but HN guidelines also say to not complain about downvotes.
If your code is swinging a multi-million-dollar robot arm near a multi-million-dollar mirror assembly, for example, it’s probably not seen as excessive to add recovery code even if some of those assertions will only be active during testing phases.
Now, this will probably get me downvoted to oblivion, but the article sounds like the rants of a loser. We all have distractions. We all enjoy wasting time. Hell, I'm writing this after 5-6 beers and my tomorrow will most probably be wasted by hangover.

But man, you definitely got to man up get your shit figured out. You're 42, you definitely didn't hit the lottery until now and the chances don't look good in the future either. You seem pragmatic enough to realize there's got to be another way out there to be successful. Get out, find it, and follow it.
At the beginning of the lockdown, as I didn't have a dedicated computer desk and chair, I was working at my dinner table, sitting on a regular dinning chair. It lasted for about 1 month or so until I broke both the chair and my back (I could not move one morning and had to spend a few days in bed).

It could be you have better sitting discipline (I tend to slouch when I sit), might be that you are more active (I didn't notice any issues last summer, when I was sailing every weekend, but then, I was not sitting at my dinner table for that long either), might be your regular chair is not that regular :)
It might not depend on many other services, but that doesn't preclude it depending on other code.
I have no idea why you would find the existence of this machine disappointing. If you wanted to work out something for yourself then you still can.
FWIW I didn’t read the username in my reply that kicked this thread off. Didn’t even really think about male or female, it was pretty rational and unbiased. Not attacking anyone or promoting a male based hegemony. I find the whole idea of having status in a forum like this silly. I just ingest ideas and I only know a few other users here because they are in my peer group in my industry. Otherwise I’m pretty username blind.
The easier computing devices get the less technical the users have to be to use them, and the more vulnerable they are to being taken advantage of.
Writing types by hand is not any less wasteful than writing documentation.
I think the distinction may blurry a bit, if you consider classes as a fancy way of writing higher order functions.

i.e:

You can think of a class as a higher order function, that takes in a list of arguments (constructor), and returns a list of functions, that are defined within the closure of those arguments

--

Hence, to me, the essence of these things are the same -- thought you are right that when people talk about dependency injection, they are also implying a specific way that these dependencies are provided (by the framework, usually magically)
I see parallels everywhere else, and that pulls me back. Fundamentally, Snowdrift.coop (start at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop) is about public goods and collective action / coordination problems. When you think enough about the alignment of individual and group incentives, you start seeing how so many societal issues (moloch!) fall into this category. And yes, I'd like to fix all of those, and I get excited about projects that try to do so. But at the end of the day, given my skills, interests, connections, etc, nothing else I could do has the tiniest fraction of the potential to make a difference in the world that Snowdrift.coop does.
In effect, it's an advertisement for a competing retailer.

If you slap it right on the store page, true enough. But if you're sharing the information in-game, the analogy doesn't quite hold.

In fact I'd argue it breaks down even if the label is on an Apple dialog that pops up in (or from) your game. When you allow Apple into your user experience like that, you're the one who's giving eyeballs to them.
Well, that's because news coverage and forums are very heavily biased towards reporting on the US. Even in non-US countries.

There has been some discussion of the effects of Cambridge Analytica on the Brexit referendum and UK elections. However, in the UK, traditional media ownership and cronyism is more of a serious problem.
If could be due to videos of him that show him saying how a 20:1 return on vaccines are a good investment (& presumably how his personal wealth almost doubled since ms days), as well as several citations of where he (& his wife) point the finger at over population as a problem, stating how a 10% reduction of global population would help.

His father was a known supporter of eugenics, apparently.

There are several memes out there highlighting the obvious: He's not a medical doctor.

I'd recommend watching the series on him by the Corbett Report [0] who always carefully cite original sources for the information presented.

[0] https://www.corbettreport.com/gates/
> In fact, it isn't even a function, it's just a value.

What's the difference?
This type of reasoning only gives you intuition about half the conjecture. The conjecture says two things:

1. No sequence grows bigger and bigger forever; and

2. No sequence gets caught in a loop (except for the trivial 4 -> 2 -> 1 -> 4 loop).

Your article addresses 1, but I don't think it says much about 2. Sure, sequences should probably trend downward over time, but why shouldn't a sequence that hops upward at the beginning get snagged on a value it's already hit as it falls back down, trapping it a nontrivial loop?
Reminds me of something I remember playing with years ago, where you could draw various materials on the screen. Brick, sand, water, and then add different types of explosives. A really fun simulation all in the browser.

Anyone remember what this is?
Google Play has over 30 categories for applications: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Appstore has over 20 categories for applications:
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/categories/

Categories range from Books, Medical, Business, Finance, Music, Photo & Video, Health & Fitness, Entertainment, Shopping, Productivity to Games. And the list goes on and on.

What are gaming consoles used for? Gaming. Maybe you can create apps to do something else but it wasn't meant to be general purpose.
I think keyword here is

>performance-critical code.
Leaving things broken is not an efficient way of fixing them.
The 300k-year case for the 15-hour week
The 7 Traits of Conspiratorial Thinking
Maybe Twilio will use that run up (bubble) in stock price to allocate to some tech debt like this.

169% YTD
33.8% last 3 months

I’ve always looked at SendGrid as a premium provider for transactional mail. Why recommendations for something better but similarly priced?
You are describing my life lol.
Yes, and my point is that the mechanisms to prevent battery degradation can often end up masking the degradation. This isn't nefarious, it's the byproduct of good state if charge management.
Commercial labs screw up all the time, particularly if they don't do the test very often.
When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive?
Sure, and Visicalc before that, probably others.
For a company that went out and acquired a 2FA subsidiary, Twilio really doesn't seem to have their 2FA story together.

For example you'd think a company with an division dedicated to authentication would support what the industry considers the best 2FA solution: WebAuthn. Sadly that is not an option for your Twilio account (other Auth providers like Duo support WebAuthn).

Twilio has also been emailing me the past few months telling me I must turn on 2FA on my account. This is weird since I have TOTP enabled.

I feel like Twilio must be internally conflicted about this. As a company dedicated to phone services they really want to push SMS solutions even though SMS based 2FA is vastly inferior to WebAuthn.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've already done it more than once with this new account, and we're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That video does not appear to show anything for four minutes. Did I miss something?

Edit: Now I have a feeling that I got trolled and that's the point of the video
The uber-expensive office chairs are really comfortable--if you pick one that works for you and properly adjust it. If you have an office and can afford it, it's IMO worth it to equip it with a good chair.

That said, I probably only work in my office half the day and work in other spots around the house (including the dining room table) the rest of the time. (And get up and walk around quite frequently.)
Generics Examples by the Go Team
But when you publish a paper on Monarch, aren't you giving away the core idea?

In the case of PageRank, at least it was published after Google had already dominated the search space, i.e., many years after the conception, implementation, and utilization.

I wonder if Google papers are internally reviewed before publishing so as to make sure only partial information is revealed, and not the secret sauce.
Microsoft was already evil long before browsers and the web.

Jesus. Someone should write history book about this so that people don't forget. Their OEM contracts, stealing products killing startups in legal battles. MS was fully monopolistic for a long time.
It's certainly a topic for discussion in the other democracies. Before COVID-19 sent everything haywire, Canada's parliament was holding sessions on the question of American electoral interference on social media.

Once it's back on track, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's management have a good chance of having arrest warrants issued if they don't start actually testifying and cooperating.
Ever heard of the Nissan Leaf?
IMO the tough part isn't in finding some game/physics engine (there are many out there), but in getting/creating suitable assets.
That example seems a bit odd as a design. You’re throwing an exception to represent a no result, but suppressing it to convert the exception to a none. Monads give you the convenience while being consistent.
Feeling Burned Out? Here Is How to Overcome Burnout at Work
How Listening to Music Energizes Workout Sessions
OE-Cake? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OE-Cake!
I don't think this would be true just for developing world. Till the whole Tiktok-Trump thing started, did teens using Tiktok even knew where the owner was from. It has an English name, English language localization.
An American friend of mine was living in the Middle East, I think married to a Middle Eastern man, and I think she had a baby. Some other woman at the hospital had triplets and everyone was gaga over the triplets.

My American friend was uncomfortable with the situation and said something about it to someone to the effect that "It's cool now, but when she is home and caring for triplets alone, this will be a terrible burden." The person looked at her like she had completely lost her mind and told her "She is never going to have to care for triplets alone."

I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I supported my husband's military career and raised and homeschooled our special-needs sons. And since the divorce, life has been extremely hard.

My stats tend to be out of date, but I spent a lot of time reading a lot of stuff to try to sort out how and why my life went so very wrong. I was one of the top students in my graduating high school class and won a National Merit Scholarship, etc.

The last time I looked at stats, women who were childless and unmarried made about 97 percent of what men made with similar education and experience. The minute she had either a husband or child, the average dropped to two-thirds what men make -- the same the Bible quotes a woman as making 2000 years ago.

These are American stats and European women tend to fare somewhat better. It's also less bad these days, from what I gather, then it was 30 years ago.

But I continue to be stymied in my efforts to establish an adequate income for myself and my sons. And I'm quite clear my gender is a very large part of that.

I do not self-identify as a feminist. I was a homemaker for a lot of years and most self-proclaimed feminists I meet are openly hostile towards me, a la that scene in "Mona Lisa Smile."

Women still are heavily burdened by the issue of childbearing and childrearing. And in the US you mostly have some kind of "equality" with men if you choose to not have children. And if you do have kids, your life can be completely flushed down the toilet over it and other people will shrug and say "Well, you shouldn't have had kids if you couldn't afford them."

It's also not a policy that is sustainable. If we actively and successfully encourage all women to stop having kids, this is the last generation of humans.

We have to find some means to give all people, regardless of gender or age, some kind of decent quality of life. We shaft far too many of our people and then wonder why there are headlines on Hacker News about the social fabric coming unraveled.

They are only "far apart" if you have a narrow view of quality of life. I don't and my life experience tells me it is far more complex than most Westerners want to believe who like to claim we are the height of civilized achievement for all of human history and don't make us uncomfortable with niggling details about how mothers get shafted or something.
Plan B would be to get a more challenging job for much better pay :-)
I guess you have babies? It gets easier!
They do have 2FA they just don't require 2FA.
Yes. Only use the more dangerous function when you have cause to do so.
That's not mediocrity, that's a happy life...
You could definitely build Monarch from this paper. It is very detailed. But keep in mind that Monarch is already ten years old.
This is the paper that introduced them to FP, if you’re interested in the original reasoning.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/b...
High-Tech Tracking Reveals 'Whole New Secret World of Birds'
Powder?
https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust2/
Maybe it is a good idea for next time to provision a vm/machine closer to where you are deploying? It would also prevent loss of progress when the connection got dropped or something.
Yeah, and if only there were a way to more precisely say things like "in the middle of then night" or "around solar noon", or "halfway between lunch and dinner". We might even put numbers on these things so that everyone knows exactly what we're talking about!

Local time is incredibly useful. It's never going away. It's utter fantasy to think that everyone is ever going to just give up local time and only speak in vague terms like "an hour after noon".
I'm not part of the industry or well-read on it so I can't well explain why, but if I had to guess this is due to the dramatically smaller volumes involved.

There's far fewer desktop monitors and laptops being shipped than phones or TVs, and the majority of desktop and laptop panel sales are tied up in basic office-grade econoscreens and gaming monitors focused on high refresh rates and low input latency. Midrange/affordable laptop/desktop OLED panels fit neither of these categories and as such haven't received nearly as much investment and R&D.
Tesla targeted in failed ransomware extortion scheme
Amazon SES can work for that.
Sounds like an engineering problem the can be solved with the right mix of experts, motivation driven by mission, and limitless funding by the likes of Musk to grease the wheels of innovation in this domain and problem space.
I am getting fatigued by all of these new acronyms and pronouns, and I consider myself socially left-leaning.