skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think perception is the largest part. The word “bus” conjures up a dirty, homeless-guy horror show to a lot of people, compared to the quiet elegance of a train conductor peacefully snipping your ticket in a leather chair.

Second, in many cities, trains actually predate the highways.

Third, trains have super high capacity, as do subways and light rail. You need more buses to keep up. However, buses are cheap, and there are things like extra-long articulating buses and double-deckers that can be used on high-volume or long-haul routes. I think buses actually have a practical edge here: instead of trains coming every hour, you could have a big bus come every 10 minutes, which smoothes out load at end stations. And if one breaks down, the other buses can just drive around it. If a subway breaks down in New York, it can cause delays that ripple out to the whole system.
Ask HN: How much equity should an early employee get in 2020?
Recently received an offer from a startup. The mission is interesting, the team seems nice. I am trying to figure out whether the amount of equity I am getting is "fair". In the current state, I'll be the second engineer(and employee) and the company has raised a pre-seed. I'll be giving up a job in a Big N to take this up. While I understand startups aren't the best way to make money, and money isn't the primary motivator here, I am just trying to understand what fair equity looks like.

Above being my situation, to generalize this so that this thread is helpful for others maybe people can share

1. How much equity did you get?

2. What #employee were you?

3. What stage was the company in?

4. What seniority/role did you get hired for?

5. How was the cash salary compared to market?
I have a different take on this. Not everyone is Paul Graham. Paul Graham would not have written this before founding his company. He'd not have thought "there are only 52 weekends when I'm 25 so let me just party".

Most people, especially those who have not made it in life, are worried about survival. Especially people with kids. They sacrifice their time with kids so that their kids can have a better life than them. So that they can move them from <insert class here> to upper <insert class here>. They work hard, attend pointless meetings so that they can get ahead in their career, not upset anyone and make sure they have health insurance. They do insane commutes for the same reason. Most people do not have the luxury to choose.

People are more unsure of their survival despite greater wealth. A single medical incident could bankrupt them. There are people on Blind wondering if $2 million is enough to retire. A friend of mine was worried that he'd not be able to hit his goal of a net worth of $5 million at his current company (he makes around $600k). Everyone is trying to get ahead and there's serious FOMO if one is not ambitious. This is prevalent especially in Silicon Valley companies.

The only solution to live life the way PG envisions is to guarantee basic income, shelter and healthcare.
Adding to what you said, when I worked more intensely I found lots of success in freeing time by stacking, delegating, batching and subtracting:

-lots of passive pleasures can be enjoyed while commuting, shopping or dishwashing. You can read, listen, move. Some people even manage to produce (eg write novels) on the train to work.

-lots of stuff can be done by other people. Eat takeaway, have your clothes and house professionally cleaned if you don’t enjoy doing it. Is it expensive? Yes. But if you’re a high achiever you’ll get a lot more ROI out of putting the energy you’re saving by delegating into either work or more rest.

-still unnafordable to eat out every meal even if it’s a good idea? Cool once a month or once a week. Shop once a month or once a week. It’ll save you oodles of time and money. Apply to every possible chore.

-still taking too much time and energy to take care of everything in your life? Pull a Soylent. Delete entire categories of concerns. Adopt a uniform. Get brutal with time wasters.
Good luck. It will be more difficult than expected, just be ready for that. But it will be worth it.
I think a lot of Americans are still in the world war 2 generation mindset about the US being corruption-free. The truth is that corruption at every level has gotten steadily worse throughout the last century, but the culture hasn’t yet changed to be vigilant of it, probably because most Americans are very honest themselves.
Your cancer is gone...but don't get angry. Like ever.
> Don't let your bad experiences with overhyped database

<rant>
I've picked up RethinkDB once. That was early 2016, it had existed for a while (about 6 years at that time), was deemed a stable production-ready database, had passed Jepsen tests without any serious issues, etc etc. Was it overhyped? Could be but I don't think so - it wasn't shoved down anyone's throat, there weren't any "web scale" memes about it, just a post here on HN, every couple months or so, whenever they made some improvements or posted great technical articles. Looked totally good to me.

It was great for development. Yet, it ended up as a small disaster when the production systems gained some traction. Awful disk usage (I've had to read the source to investigate the serialization formats and be aware about undocumented efficiency considerations), led to servers grinding to a halt due to heavy I/O. And when nodes had sustained the load, they had slowly leaked memory (that was not the caches, unless cache size limiters were broken), so eventually kernel had to invoke OOM killer and that caused a node restart. This resulted in a daily/bi-daily 1-minute downtime blips on the health monitoring. Essentially, it was a huge waste of resources for a couple of nice-to-have features. And in the meanwhile, the company who made the database had shut down - after 7 years of existence.

I've gradually replaced almost all of it with CockroachDB which took a fraction of disk space and CPU time. I went for a distributed DB because I had three nodes anyway; and I was feeling adventurous enough to try CockroachDB only because of the idea that I can trivially switch to tried & trusted PostgreSQL at any moment. Fortunately, it seems to work well for my current load and dataset, although that could be just me being lucky.
</rant>

Now, I believe, unless something is a toy project or one accepts the risk to rewrite things to use a different storage, a database (and other core technologies) should be chosen in a conservative fashion. Unless there is a plan B.

I have a plan for a small new toy project which could possibly benefit from a graph+document database. I've looked at ArrangoDB recently and it could be a good fit. Yet, if ArrangoDB would start to disappoint for me, say, after a few months in production, there will be no plan B - unless I spend more resources designing this escape hatch than I'd save by using a fancy graph database. So I'm picking PostgreSQL - something that may require a bit of extra work but that I'm 100% sure about.

Just an opinion: long-term safety beats development convenience.
How is this conflating tax with profit margin?
Which, in FP, is all but invisible: the arguments to a function literally are its dependencies.

I think OOP has more primitive concepts (and more mutation) than FP, so dependency injection in OOP also includes object construction and often mocking effectful operations. That's why it gets its own name in OOP, while being more of an ambient idea in FP.
Something that tripped me when setting up a new monitor was dealing with also the software set rgb range (0-255 or 16-235). By default I didn't get true(er) blacks because it clamped from below to 16.
> I have seen those suggestions too, but they seem to be just parroted off of each other. I have never seen a single one link to any reasoning or studies that support the claims of better readability. They all seem to say it because someone else said it in a game of design telephone.

I so wish I could find that research that once and for all debunked the "UX expert" urban myth that #fff + #000 = evil. It made me consider past mistakes and I go for all black on all white whenever I can. Doesn't hurt from a WCAG perspective.
So do you need monads in Haskell because that's the only way you could do some of the things that are trivial in an imperative language (albeit verbose and arguably inelegant)?
> This is why it's important for STEM and tech people to have some understanding of liberal arts

What has "an understanding of liberal arts" got to do with this? Sounds like an unnecessary reach.
Yes, the government negotiates with the manufacturers, sets the price, and if they don't come to an agreement the drug cannot be sold in Canada. That's in line with what I said. Fine, it may need an overhaul, however, it's dramatically more functional than the literally nothing the US does.
How does it deal with HTTPS blocking? My Linksys does not handle it.
I'm starting to think that the media's breathless anti-Q reporting is more dangerous than QAnon itself.

Okay Q is a wacky conspiracy theory. What's the headline real-world event here though? Some kid walked into a pizza joint with a rifle. That's pretty much it. He didn't shoot anyone, didn't explicitly threaten anyone, didn't break anything. But that makes this cult a massive danger?

Meanwhile, hundreds of nationwide riots have been going on for months, burning down thousands of businesses, destroying livelihoods, but don't you dare even question the legitimacy of that.
Ok. But let's use really cheap bluish LEDs to save some money.
Fine. Set it all to UTC for all I care.

Maybe it's the delusion of grandeur of pretending to rule over time itself that annoys me more than the practical inconvenience.
That’s not the only weird sabotage that has happened in San Jose. Back in 2009, someone intentionally cut some fiber optic cables. They’ve never been found.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/04/09/san-jose-police-sabot...
You can't play 10,000 hours of Civ. At some point, the game become repetitive because the possibilities space is very limited. EU4, on the other hand, has pretty much unlimited possibilities. You can negotiate deals with neighboring countries, there are way more countries (whole world actually) than in Civ, you have a complicated Trade system that can make you money, a more sophisticated religion structure that you can use for your advantage...

Wait, I should stop playing these games.
I think the point was that they own a literal 2FA company, but don't have 2FA
Say you have a drug that you need to charge $100 to make it worth your time. Other countries say they will only pay $20 for it. Since the US doesn't have price controls, they will charge $180 here to make up for missing revenue in other countries. So in effect, the US subsidizes countries with universal healthcare.
On the other hand, the people in those seats rarely do so for more than an hour. Other factors kick in because of that, such as cost and space utilization (which is effectively cost in a different form).

Then again, I rarely had issues with sitting in them. Working space though, that was an issue. (Work on an in-class problem while referring to the text book? Ha!)
That will only happens if they gain the credibility to run it. I would expect a lot of people (above poster included, and myself to an extent) will prefer the AppStore for most of their apps. It will force those AppStore’s to compete, for developers and for users. And isn’t that what capitalism is meant to be all about?
I just don’t agree this stuff is worth worrying about. It seems pointless and silly. Do you think Carmack would be insulted if someone called him a programmer?
I got a gaming chair at the beginning of lockdown, and I propped up my desk to get everything to the right height. The things I looked for : adjustable arm rests, adjustable height, adjustable tilt and headrest & lumbar support.

Also buy a 28" 4k monitor, proper keyboard and mouse device of choice (I got an apple magic pad).

All for ~ £500. It's worth the investment.
I haven't even turned 30 yet, so I imagine my body might well slowly be building up resentment towards me which will materialise in 20 years and I'll regret saying all of this, but...

So far, my body has been happy spending extended amounts of time in any chair I set under it. Including the staple dining chair, or uncushioned outdoor wooden chair.

However, I rarely sit still for long periods of time. I'm constantly shifting my position and doing all sorts of seated acrobatics to relieve tension and get variation. (I do this also in fancy ergonomic chairs.) Maybe this is what makes it work? I have no idea.
In Europe when you buy a battery you are already paying the tax for recycling, and places where they sell these batteries have to accept the dead batteries and send them for recycling.
> Open sourcing anything at Google tends to be rather difficult because much of the technology we build is built on other technology that has not been released

Monarch might be an exception to that, though, because - as noted in the paper -, it has to be built without many dependencies, since almost everything else depends on it for monitoring and alerting.

That being said, I'm sure it would be extremely difficult to open source now since it was never built with open sourcing in mind.
I've always wondered why Facebook's role in the US elections is such a hotly debated topic but Facebook's role in the elections of all the other democracies in the world is not touched upon at all.
Gee, I was just thinking I needed to make some new chairs for the kitchen table (which seems to be a somewhat challenging woodworking project, as curves as usually called for and the way to craft them isn't obvious). I wish the article offered more advice about what makes a good chair, or chair alternative.
The sad reality with phones is whatever Apple doss most if not all other manufacturers follow one way or another.

Samsung used to allow you to remove your battery easily but they also stopped at least in their flagship phone, last time I looked at one anyway. I know they also offer phones that do allow for this but the flagship phones really set the tone I feel for the downstream expectations over time.

Rather unfortunately I don’t think Apple sees value in removable batteries, which while I understand the trade offs I think is a net negative in this case
Mrs. Krabappel: Well, children, our new ultra-hard PostCherfect chairs have arrived. They’ve been designed by eminent posturologists to eliminate slouching by the year 3000.

Martin: Mrs. Krabappel, I’m having back spasms!

Mrs. Krabappel: I know they seem a little uncomfortable right now, but eventually your bones will change shape.
Is it the victim’s responsibility to separate out good and bad actors from a group whose foundational texts call for violence against those of other belief systems? Do victims need to shoulder the burden of making individualized statements that don’t offend over broadly recognizing threats and securing their own safety?

Sorry but you can’t blame the victims (Hindus) for wanting to be free of attacks on their people, culture, religion, and sovereignty. That is no different than blaming a rape victim. Likewise, you can’t pejoratively label people who recognize the threats of anti-Hindu sentiments/cultures/groups as committing hate speech or being *phobic. Defending one’s way of life is just common sense, not hateful.

As for the current “ruling dispensation” being Islamophobic, what is your evidence for that? Please don’t say CAA, which has been debunked numerous times over as just a way to grant refugee status to persecuted minority groups from surrounding Islamic nations. Those are countries that have Islam as their official state religion - it seems they are much more deserving of your attention in this regard than India or the BJP, since they are by definition much more hostile to those of different cultures/beliefs.

Lastly, your submission history shows you are repeatedly posting similar stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ashleshbiradar). This isn’t in the spirit of HN guidelines.
Over half of gold is used for industrial and jewelry applications. Exactly 0% of bitcoin has non-criminal, non-speculative use.
Why not? Large, high res OLED TVs are common (if expensive). Burn-in?
This doesn’t address much of your comment, but I work on systems with millions of req/s, but even with billions you can still sample to do logging and monitoring. But you’re right, we don’t care that every request works, just that 99.9% do.
That is an interesting game. Thanks for sharing.
Isn't that Inversion Of Control, not Dependency Injection? I've always thought of Dependency Injection as about "declaring a class in terms of its dependencies' interfaces, but allowing a framework to take responsibility for instantiating the actual dependency objects" - whereas "a function that accepts a function" is IoC (e.g. https://kentcdodds.com/blog/inversion-of-control/)

They're very closely related concepts - both abstractly saying "let me define unit of logic in terms of how it composes passed-in units of logic", but the distinction between "objects that need to be instantiated and injected at construction time" and "functions that are passed in at runtime" is pretty large.
And indeed, that is exactly what Epic did within Fortnite that has led to their current banning.
That is something I've struggled with as well. Do you have any suggestions for resources, that could help overcome that challenge?
Burn the book and collect data from the bonfire.

Everyone is different. Just expand your mind regarding things that interest you. Your mind is like "ehhh I don't enjoy this material". Which is fine. It's dry af.

Get really deep in something coding related you do love, and can 2x or 3x your income with, and come back to TaoCP.
Yes, go ahead and set a 10 minutes rather than infinite or 10 seconds. That will make it much easier to realize that things are frozen because they will raise exceptions and logs all over the place.

To be pedantic though, infinite timeouts don't break applications except some rare cases of resources exhaustion. If an application is completely unresponsive, it is dead for good, not because of the timeout, need to fix the root cause (often resource exhaustion like swapping or it's waiting on another IO or service that's frozen).
Yikes, you guys. Please don't do flamewars on HN and especially not tit-for-tat spats like this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After doing some more research, it seems the major alternatives are Postmark, MailGun, and Amazon SES. I liked one comment left by Postmark on another HN post where they say they want high quality senders, so I think I'm going to Postmark...
Should You Send Your Child Back to School During the Pandemic?
An electron app with an rce?
Wow this is so unexpected never thought this would happen.
There could stand to be more thought in many applications put into timeouts and cancellation and how it should all work in the face of APIs that might be unresponsive or slow sometimes. But I don't think that putting some arbitrary timeout as the default everywhere is really a good idea.

Many of these things are used for one-off scripts, where it isn't worth thinking about. For many APIs, it isn't worth the trouble - if one of your dependent services is unresponsive, there isn't really any meaningful thing your application can do anyways. It doesn't become an issue until there are so many timeouts that it's impacting other resources. Best to leave it off until you know what you want to do with it.
I strongly suspect this is actually not a free speech issue, and just boils down to contract law. Akin to an NDA.
I think you may have just invented the whiteboard.
That code that "is getting pretty ugly" seemed ok to me.
An SSD that's only being read really will last ~forever. It has the same wear-out process as a CPU or RAM. A hard drive will wear out based on power-on hours and start/stop cycles, regardless of how much you use it. I'm not saying you should blindly assume that your SSD will never break, since they can and do randomly stop working, but it seems clear that reliability is a clear win for SSD over HDD, especially in consumer applications where the mere passage of time is the thing that will kill hard drives.
Why do we write books, make movies, music or art?
OP here. I was fascinated by the author's take on the juxtaposition of Bill Gates' malevolent legacy of old, to wit:

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720...

with the "new" Bill Gates model of what seems to be benevolence and global amity. Personally, I struggle with my sourness towards his past behaviour in light of what I see as admirable conduct in the present.
Reminds me of the games VISA plays to deter merchants from cash discounting.
What baffles me is that there aren't any (widely known) mods to turn STK gameplay into something else, like NFS or Wipeout. I've seen one vid on YouTube about increasing karts' speed, which proves that it's at least possible (rather obviously with an open-source game). Maybe the physics engine doesn't lend itself to that, dunno.
I do agree women and men are far from equal in western society (America in particular), but it’s a strained comparison, which is where I think your downvotes came from. There are some parallels, but they are far apart.
I'd also like to point out the spreadsheet functionality of org-mode as a terminal based spreadsheet.

I actually started using org-mode for this feature. I had been using sc-im, but found it limiting, especially the because you cannot pass a range of cells to a custom function. In org-mode this is no problem at all, plus there are many more built in functions.
Yes, it is a form of 2PC that happens transparently during normal transactions. It is designed to perform well for production workloads whereas Vitess now has 2PC but warns against using it and requires configuration changes to enable it.
Reminds me of https://mobile.twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/2856708222...
It makes sense that social distancing works for the flu and other diseases, too. See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01538-8
>Is Success Luck or Hard Work?

Yes, no doubt.

The impossible thing to know is the measure of success since there has never been a proven accurate technique for that.

Not even financial success and that is truly a pure numbers game.
Wooden Flower Pot and Table Two in One Good Idea for Home
What service do people recommend in place of SendGrid?

Personally I need a service to send transactional emails from my company website with a low chance that they’ll be marked as spam. Tracking is not necessary (I disabled that in SendGrid).
Personal attacks are not ok on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Digging up details from someone's history and bringing them in here as ammunition in an argument is particularly not ok. That's a practice of the online callout/shaming culture, and we're trying to avoid that on HN. Not that the callouts are always wrong, but callout/shaming culture has toxic systemic effects that are incompatible with the intended spirit of this site.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You could also combine furniture instead of buying an expensive standing desk:

https://imgbox.com/9tFW5Pvs
I think you just haven't played the right games. There are some incredible games which, to me, have the same appeal as Michelangelo's David is to some (personally, to me, its just a sculpture, nothing too interesting -- my point is, the art that some people find meaningful and interesting is completely subjective and depends on the person).
Please don't do this, and please stop using HN for generic ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Mysterious Repeating Radio Burst from Space Is Back, Right on Time
I had a Nissan Leaf during 5 years (untill june this year). I have driven around 71000 km. I have not seen any battery degradation.