skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VC's won't fund anything in Big Tech's "kill zone", and bootstrapped projects need profits to sustain themselves. It is very difficult to turn a profit while facing a competitor that can run perpetual losses.

I find the "kill zone" theory plausible and supported by available evidence [1,2,3]. Others (a large consulting firm) disagree [4].

[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/incumbents-vs-startups-the-cas...

[2] https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/Documents/research/events/...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-destroy-modemyth-or-r...

[4] https://www.aei.org/economics/a-new-analysis-takes-a-shot-at...
Yeah, I've been keeping an eye on their site which seems to indicate they were going to release something. I guess that's not happening any more!
Can you find a better source than the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies?
Advertising by definition is biased. In contrast, journalists sometimes provide balance to company announcements.
Why Stephen Hawking Never Won the Nobel Prize in Physics!? (2018)
> Fixing grammar, typos and formatting only
is complete non-sense. And non-sense is highly discouraged.

This comment in the README is pretty shitty - those sorts of fixes are still valuable.
Sure, but I never said I was doing this in library code. I mentioned I was using it to track down an unexpected print statement.

And the other example was in module scope.
SEEKING WORK | Toronto, ON Canada (UTC-5) | REMOTE ONLY

Senior Software Developer, 6+ years experience

Backend: Elixir

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Availability: 40+ hrs / week

I love Elixir and I’ve been using it and Phoenix since August 2015. Before that I was mostly doing Ruby/Rails work.

Worked on projects delivered worldwide at scale, at reputable companies such as theScore.

In the frontend I’ve mostly worked with React and Vue.JS. I’ve also worked with Elm in the past. And am most familiar with React Native for mobile apps.

Other stuff:

Personal GitHub: https://github.com/tristan-secord

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If you think you can use me for something you can contact me at tristan.secord@gmail.com
a thirst for new knowledge and the ability to communicate that knowledge to others in a way they understand. Speaking to a fellow programmer is different than speaking to a manager is different than speaking to a customer.

also, knowing how to say "no" professionally and firmly is an important and respected skill.

finally, being able to see the forest through the trees and value the business side of what you're doing is a key perspective. Everyone loves to trash talk Sales/Marketing/Management but those people turn your programming into your paycheck so a little understanding is deserved.
No, the comment I am replying to is 100% wrong.

Store brands are a form of price discrimination, which is anti-competitive and illegal. Courts and regulators significantly weakened enforcement in the 80s, but the laws haven't changed.

Price discrimination (known as price segmentation in the business world) is perfectly legal, as long as it is between products and not between customers (and even there it might still be as long as the discrimination isn't based on a protected class). Price segmentation of products has always been legal in the US.

Store brands have been a thing for centuries. Most stores used to just sell the house brand.

Indeed, the concept of selling a "third party" brand in a store is a relatively recent development that can largely be traced to farm supply stores and the rise of department stores...which, notably sold their own store brands alongside those of other companies for decades without antitrust issues. (In fact, Sears' antitrust issues related to their use of market power to obtain discounts or to fix prices in certain geographic markets. They never had issues with selling store brands).
Not an answer to your question - but as an aside, why the tone? In the classic HN example, isn't Dropbox just an inferior Rsync?

Eg, if someone wants to clone something and it manages to succeed, they clearly got _something_ right. Either a captive audience, a better UX, a better pricing structure, etc. There's almost always room for ~innovation~ competition, so why poke fun at it?

I suppose if you think it's truly inferior in every way compared to Caprover your tone might make sense - but even then, i've never heard of Caprover, if i was a customer looking for this product (and i may be) i'd probably have defaulted to DigitalOcean for this. If that alone ends up being profitable for them - a Caprover clone with a well known name - why wouldn't they do it?

I see these types of "HN Dropbox" comments on HN so frequently and i just don't get it. There's lots of angles to product viability, and these comments seem to be purposefully ignorant. Not saying you are ignorant, just that the comments seem to try to ignore any logical reason for competition.
Thanks - I was using Firefox on a mac. But you're right, Chrome doesn't have this issue.
Yeah but I fail to understand when that happened in the past?

Google Analytics appeared in 2005, and as far as I know as a tech person, they never marketed it aggressively.

How did we go from sometime in 2003, when analytics packages (no matter how basic) were downloaded from sourceforge or gnu or whatever and installed on your website ...

to sometime in 2015 when you're working for a small/indie tech company, your website is mostly working and you're thinking of doing analytics on your website and someone suggests to you "you should just use Google Analytics, everyone does it, it's what you do, why would you use something else or write your own" ... ???

Also if Google Analytics is so popular among web-backends, there must be other service-apis that backend-devs use without even a second thought?
App Makes Me Fat
It does hold out! Here is a link to my research on retyping code [1]. To summarize my findings, students that regularly completed typing exercises earned higher course grades and submitted less erroneous code.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177
3 scientists win Nobel physics prize for black hole research
Unfortunately I have to disappoint you. DDR5 is expected to be significantly more expensive than DDR4 at a system level, byte for byte.
> systemic thinking / understanding

I was going to phrase it as "simultaneously seeing the forest and the trees."

The vast majority of my programming career has involved (1) taking a huge amount of information (specs, code), (2) building a mental model of it at 2+ levels of detail (high-level to fit a simplified holistic system in my mental swap space, and detail to have all the details about this problem at hand), (3) identifying the needle in the haystack, & (4) coming up with a simple solution.

As the parable goes [1], it's knowing which bolt to turn & how far.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
A bit unrelated to the article, but I have often wondered if there are certain users of prediction markets that have a much better track record than the average person (not just statistical noise, but actually better at predicting events). If so, it seems the owner of the prediction market could ensemble these users’ predictions to make a much better overall prediction than any one individual user.
that's the one that's linked to in this post :)
Yeah, that is actually kinda the whole point.
Makes me wonder about all these shortages in labor markets where companies complain about their inability to find qualified staff.
Another one: if you happen to keep big numerical values in a VARCHAR field, be careful, the engine will convert them to DOUBLE when comparing to a big integer, and interesting things will happen. For example, "SELECT id, clmn FROM tbl WHERE clmn = 999999999999999999" may return records where `clmn` is '999999999999999999', also where `clmn` is, for example, '999999999999999998' (because those big integers are too big for DOUBLE and, when converted, they have the same representation).

So the correct query is "SELECT id, clmn FROM tbl WHERE clmn = '999999999999999999'"
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Whenever you post an interview question online your interviewers life get a little bit harder. These questions get blacklisted for being associated with their company and they then have to synthesize a new question
Personally I see no reason to start a new project with Erlang unless you really enjoy its syntax (perhaps for someone who has a solid background in Prolog?).

With Elixir you get everything in Erlang plus a lot of extremely powerful libraries/frameworks (e.g. Ecto and Phoenix), macros, a friendlier syntax etc.
Then you just switch to snowmobiles...
I thi to it would work better if it actually showed one ball drop at a time, instead of just quickly generating the same bar/scatter graphs that the original sites show.

The single ball drop, with slower motion, gives you a chance to feel the uncertainty.
I wonder if this has anything to do with drug re-importation laws.

I wish someone would do something about it. Like an executive order or something.
I wrote https://wapp.tcl.tk/ for occasions such as this. SQLite is built-in, of course.

One key feature Wapp is that identical code can be run as

+ CGI from Apache

+ SCGI from Nginx

+ As its own stand-alone webserver

So, for development work on your desktop you run it as a standalone webserver. It even pops up its root page in your webbrowser automatically when you launch it. Then, once you get things working there, you "scp" the one small source-code file that implements your application up into a CGI-enabled directory of you server, and is just works.
re: Osteopathic clinic, in the original article they outline treatment as follows:

"Manual treatment was provided to aid central lymphatic drainage, improve mechanics and reduce the inflammation of the spine and reduce the allostatic load by improving the sympathetic tone."

This indicates they are doing some sort of massage or physical therapy to induce drainage. This would be in line with osteopathic therapy.
There's no state of nature where people are engaging in private transactions with legally enforced contracts, creating corporations with limited liability up to the size of the investment, etc. Those are all constructs of society.

Your idea that there are these transactions and property 'outside of society' that we have to protect from interference from society does not seem coherent to me, when the existence of a society that does grant private property rights is what allows a Google to exist in the first place.
To my hardware colleagues on HN, what prevents something similar to Dennard Scaling on DRAMs?

My very naive textbook knowledge is that every bit for DRAM uses up a single transistor and a capacitor, whereas a SRAM cell uses up 6 transistors.

How is it then that with all the scaling so far that traditional SRAMs haven't caught up with DRAM capacities? A single DRAM chip is huge compared to the total die size of any micro-processor.

As the sibling comment asks about cheaper DRAMs, I'm trying to understand how using SRAMs haven't caught up yet from a price/GB perspective.
So your chances of getting such a job go from 0.001% to 0.01%? I'll take my chances in the Midwest.
While you may be right, looking at job boards is the only objective measurement I can make. Maybe the jobs are hiding under different names, in different places. Who knows.
To me, seeing there's little jobs and that there's a clear decline in Stackoverflow Trends, and that Elixir isn't even in the top 50 in Tiobe, this all means something.
Hearing of people saying they can't get a job - means something.
I'm sure if you're in one of the major tech cities in the U.S, you could probably land an Elixir job. You can also land a Haskell job. Or Ocaml or anything else under the sun. This means little for most people who don't live there.
Flu diagnosed as COVID? Lack of people going into the hospital?
Start with the startupy books and it might be easier to get ahold of the publishers. Plus you might get a bit of an influencer impact when they share on social.

Think about how masterclass does it, then niche down into startups and follow the playbook.

Feel free to ping me (email in profile) if you end up going down this path and need suggestions for initial folks to reach out to.

Oh actually, while you’re on the front page of HN, drop a contact form on the page with something like “interested in having your book hosted?”

Might “fill the funnel” with even less work. Good luck!
Speaking of Karl Schwarzschild, here's an interesting tidbit that, in my experience, few non-German speakers know:

The literal translation of "Schwarzschild" (or "schwarzer Schild") to English would be "black shield". So him discovering the first black hole spacetime was certainly very appropriate! :)

(Similarly, I was very happy when I first heard about the Poynting vector [0] which, roughly speaking, indicates the direction in which an electromagnetic wave travels.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector
It would be nice if the article directly linked to the report. The PDF can be downloaded from https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA788-1.html

The price charts are on page 10.
Broadcast is relatively easy. And one of the problems with e.g. MOOCs (for the most part) is they "solved" the problem of video lectures--which was not actually much of a problem. And everything else, with a few partial exceptions, didn't really work very well. And it's the same problem with online learning generally beyond low (maybe 10 people or so?) scale. Many of us are in larger meetings of course, but that mostly works because most people are just watching (or, more likely, half-watching).

It's mostly the same thing with events. Effectively or actually pre-recorded video is fine but that's just YouTube videos. Even chat doesn't work very well once scale goes up and I haven't seen anything that does a great job of the hallway track.
I wonder if there is research on which subjects work best this way. I believe I have heard about a literacy program that was done over radio that was shockingly successful.
Dogged persistence. Keep trying, don't be intellectually lazy. Ask someone else only once you've had numerous tries at solving a problem yourself. That, and a logical mind.
Fun fact: Carol, my co-author on the Rust book, is too, and still lives there!

I worked for Pizza Outlet/Vocelli's for seven years, so, I have some bias, haha! One of the locations I was at competed with Mineo's, so... not saying that Vocelli's is the best, but it has a special place in my heart anyway.
i guess the whole web moved in that direction over the years. from keep it simple, self-host everything and reduce all dependencies, to use the cloud and third-party services as much as possible. just check any of the mainstream websites and see how many connections to external services they make.

even in the case of Plausible, we have this self-hosted (free as in beer and free as in speech) product and a hosted cloud (free as in speech) product, and vast majority of people prefer to use our hosted cloud version.
On the other hand, some of the questions can be rather interesting to solve. I also notice there are just a few patterns/techniques that you can use to solve them so the questions themselves do not seem all that important.
It's a common practice to at least say what stack you're working on on a job ad. If it's not a requirement I usually see "We use Rails but don't expect you to know it already".
When I moved from the midwest to southern california, everyone told me I would get bored of the lack of seasons. What a load of crock. There are seasons here and they are quite distinct.

The summer is dry and hot, but it's much more pleasant being out and about in 95* weather with no humidity than 85* after a july thunderstorm in the midwest with humidity you can cut with a knife. I only sweat when I do cardio, whereas in the midwest you could be drenched in sweat sitting in the shade in that humidity.

The fall still happens, you can still drive 45 minutes to an apple orchard and see beautiful fall scenery and get your pumpkins and pick your apples, because there are massive mountain ranges nearby. Winter weather here is perfect fall weather everywhere else. 60-70 degrees by day and light jacket and jeans weather by night.

Winter is also the rainy season, so you will see some dramatic storms and very interesting fog and mist, and the hills will turn to emerald green while the midwest enters its 6 months of brown mud, salt, and dirty snow phase.

Things are in bloom all year at different times, but the spring brings on the jacaranda season, and the region erupts into purple. I've never seen a more glorious spring.

As a former midwestern transit user, crappy weather doesn't go away once you are on transit. You still have to hoof it through the snow to and from your stop and wait for the vehicle which is far worse than driving door to door and spending maybe 30 seconds on each end outside. The vehicles aren't adequately heated. Plus no one ever plowed the sidewalks in the morning, so you are blazing your own trail through the slush, getting your feet wet if you weren't prepared with Sorels.
I never understood why osteopaths aren’t in the same ballpark as chiropractors. Seems like the type of woo-ish stuff that doctors hate.
I've applied for positions at companies that ask these kind of questions, when the actual job is fixing CSS issues and making basic CRUD applications.

Interviews should be a balance between testing problem solving, ability to learn, and knowledge that applies to the actual job they would be doing.
Are you seriously implying that Tesla is the only major manufacturer that experiences defects/recalls...
This is a news release for a report, which can be found here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA788-1.html

Additionally, the RAND Corporation appears to have a high factual reporting with a slight left political bias, according to mediabiasfactcheck.com. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rand-corporation/
Hanford was primarily a weapons research and production facility. It's biggest claim to fame is that it produced the plutonium used in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

The problems there aren't due to the normal radioactive waste produced in nuclear power plants, rather it's due to the various materials used in weapons production and general nuclear research being mixed together in waste tanks.

While the waste from operating nuclear power plants certainly isn't minimal, these days we can at least store it safely. Of course, as Fukushima showed, us, there have been very bad assumptions made about the types of disasters nuclear power plants might face.
Perhaps they should ask questions relevant to the job then.
These downvotes are Poe's Law at work. I think this is actually a meta joke, folks.
I really like this, but we need lower plans for smaller managed databases.

A very small app composed of:

- App Platform using 2 containers - $12 x 2 = $24 (not sure, price is weird)

- PostgreSQL - $15

- Redis - $15

- Object Storage - $5

At ~$60 it becomes a bit too expensive.
How so? What did he do to achieve that? What moves did he taken?
It's easy to be robust when 20% of the GDP is simply pumped out of the ground and is used to fund the government.
When you are working at work, it sometimes feels like you are sleeping at work, too.
Simulating the Asteroids (1979) vector CRT on modern hardware
Exactly this. Markets are incredibly powerful, but it's a double-edged sword.

They also have failure cases and it is important to be aware and guard against those cases.
This might just be an issue of regional vocabulary though I'm sure it's used in the presumptuous way you describe as well, the underlying question isn't necessarily unfriendly or borne of a discriminatory attitude - in a Midwestern town right now, but I can recall a few weeks ago actually this exact conversation between my American friend who's from a Pakistani background and a female census taker who was from South Asia.

In her case, she used the exact same vocabulary but it was much more obvious she didn't mean to imply that they weren't native born because she herself was not native. Context is important in conversation, but there is such a thing as regional mannerisms. On the west coast my vocabulary was certainly brought up for being just a tinge different.
If only we wouldn’t forget to afford the same nuance to each other in the present...
This matching one of the original claims in the "How to Lie with Statistics" book (1954).
Storks like roosting on chimney pots and larger houses have more chimneys and more children.
Colorized and upscaled footage of a snowball fight filmed in 1896
> at least 40 years

...seeing as $MY_AGE+40 is smaller than $HUMAN_LIFE_EXPECTANCY, this does exceedingly little to reassure me. Taking my progeny into consideration tips the scales even further away from being reassured.

> no known end of life

Quite literally all that means is we haven't tested them enough to know when they'll break a priori, and instead we'll just have to deal with the consequences when they inevitably do.

> They also emit less radiation than a coal plant.

That's not taking into account everything we don't know about how they'll hold up as time ticks on. It's equivalent to me saying "this newfangled browser engine I just made is much safer than chomium, look at how few CVE's it has!"
Unfortunately, interviews, as they are currently, are more an indicator of preparation rather than job performance. It’s a game; you gotta play it.
You'd probably just have to have people create accounts, verify that they aren't bots through email and captcha, then wait for them to achieve a certain amount of cred before allowing them to have a public channel. And include a flagging system, of course. And add moderators. So yeah, not exactly a short list of things!
I was thinking this might be due to the lvles of diabetes in the US, but after checking, to my surprise the US is actually ranked 41st ?

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SH.STA.DIAB.ZS/r...
Everyone who is downvoting this comment has incurable autism.
this is presumably a response to the flood of trivial hacktober PR's that are all one line README changes that add little value
There's an option to do that a little lower down
For those interested, the code for the library behind the project is available at https://github.com/inkandswitch/cambria
It depends when in the historical record you look. The Vikings didn't just raid, they settled. Dublin, York, and Kyiv were all Viking cities. Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde, as their influence grew so did their genetic pool.
> [...] we know from the Google v Oracle filings that Android has made Google something like $10B total over all the years it’s been operating.

Over the last year and a half, Google has made over $46b in app revenue ($29.3b 2019 [1] and $17.3b H1 2020 [2]) which at a 30% cut is around $14b. That's just apps on Google Play — not counting other forms of media, Pixel sales, Android licenses (they can always re-license if it's too permissive), etc.

Do you have a source for that $10b figure? I imagine some specific part related to the suit has made much over its lifetime. It seems like Google's Android business as a whole has made much more.

[1] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019

[2] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-20...