skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are USDS and 18F, that were initially populated with ex-Googbooksoftlix engineers. Of course, everyone with a brain left USDS after Trump was elected.

https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/youll-never-be-th...

https://www.fastcompany.com/40528581/obama-federal-it-fix-it...
Not to say a merger makes sense, but telco-adjacent work like voice and SMS also has massive challenges around stamping out fraud and lots of regulatory frameworks to manage.
> If you treat other markets as being cookie cutter versions of your own market, you're going to fail.

This is a critical insight that I've seen missed more than once by business leaders.

For a time I worked for a company headquartered in London. They did business loans. They tried to expand to Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, the US, and Canada. At every point they encountered new technologies and a fundamentally different set of payment institutions.

It's not just payment institutions that are different, though. You've got a whole different regulatory apparatus, credit institutions, supporting data institutions, and consumer behavior patterns. I've run into major differences in culture and symbolism and more.

You need to account for all of it in even figuring out if expanding into a country is a good move. Then you have to puzzle out what you have that you can adapt and what you need to build fresh for this new market.

It's often easy to assume that the next market over is just like yours. As you say, this is often dangerously untrue.
I really don't like this thin client future we're heading towards.
>Almost one in five of these money-losing companies is up 100% or more this year. There are some huge gainers on this list including companies like Overstock.com (+1055%), Tesla (+429%), Peloton (+348%) and Moderna (+285%).

Peloton was a great idea with equally good execution and everyone being stuck at home has only increased its value proposition.

Moderna is one of the leading companies in the pursuit for a COVID-19 vaccine, at least allegedly so.

Tesla is Tesla. EV megatrend yada yada

I don't know the first thing about Overstock.com to be able to opine one way or another
Also I see the stock market as a train that will take me through the dark tunnel of the inflation caused by printing all the recent money.
How to avoid loss of productivity in the workplace
Absolutely hilarious scene. Made even more funny by how scarily accurate it is XD
OK so that took a bit of Googling. Apparently GnomeOS is Linux Distro with Gnome and its dependencies all installed and configured correctly and is intended to be used as a reference platform for developers who write Gnome apps.

Why is it so hard to actually put that on the website?
A warning about Glassdoor
Common problems I see in technical interviews
Interesting! Are there any details on what engine the backend is using (Chromium?) How does the “send render commands” thing work? Does it continuously stream page updates as JavaScript updates the page? How’s overhead, or how much data does it save? Can I run extensions (such as a content blocker)?

From a security perspective, I’m curious as to whether the attack model includes someone who exploits the browser and does not look to escape into the host OS, instead choosing to create UXSS and the like. Is there any work being done there as well?
the cute factor

I think PowerPC's EIEIO wins on cute.
UX Design Tips for ECommerce Websites to Explode Your Sales
> Are you getting a one time allowance to buy your home office setup (desk, external monitor, etc)?

Note that this really should be a recurring stipend. Nothing lasts forever; everything has a service life. I think a three- or four-year depreciation makes sense on a lot of these items, although this is probably something which should be considered an industry standard.
The Windows printing system is a total shit show. There are at least 3 different printing subsystems under the hood that all work differently, and none of them work particularly well.
The market is jostling with too much magicked money?
I'm very curious how we're going to look back on this moment in 3 or 5 years time. Is "let's try WFH" the corporate equivalent of "let's try an open marriage" for couples on the rocks, i.e. a "beginning of the end?"

Just wildly speculating here, the result could be the opposite. But it strikes me as possible that this could been seen in retrospect as a damaging trend, sort of like open offices.
I was gifted an HP 28S that was given as a bit of swag when our lab picked up an HP mass spectrometer. The odd battery size was a challenge back in those days. That silly thing absolutely saved me on a physical chemistry exam where I could get something close enough that the calculator could do the integration. My trusty 48G is still on my desk. Incredible how solid these were compared to the HP of today.
Snippet from "Kafka: The Definitive Guide"

People often ask how Kafka got its name and if it signifies anything specific about the application itself. Jay Kreps offered the following insight:
I thought that since Kafka was a system optimized for writing, using a writer’s name would make sense. I had taken a lot of lit classes in college and liked Franz Kafka. Plus the name sounded cool for an open source project.
So basically there is not much of a relationship.
Testing Twitter's methods of restricting blocked links and domains
This analysis needs to exclude biotech companies like Moderna, otherwise it conflates high market risk companies that are burning money trying to become profitable with companies that are high on R&D risk and are practically forbidden from making money (from the general public) but are guaranteed an exit if the science works out (and will quickly fall to zero if it doesn't).

Given the 5-10 year time frame for devices and 10-20 years for drugs and complex therapeutics, most successful biotech companies IPO after phase 1/2 trials when they have zero revenue (it's illegal for them to charge consumers for anything related to the product until it's approved). Pharmaceutical companies have the benefit of knowing "product-market fit" ahead of time so a successful phase 3 is all but guaranteed a multi-billion dollar acquisition (it even happens at phase 2 for promising candidates). This has been going on for decades with increasing frequency thanks to the pharma industry falling off the small molecule cliff and analyzing these companies in the same group as VC subsidized rideshare or whatever isn't going to yield the best results.
Without any of pricing I've already forgot about this product.
Indeed, the biggest threat to the respecting minorities (also known as rule of law) in the US today are people and institutions spouting overheated rhetoric, implying that the US regime is just as bad as China's with respect to human rights.

This supposed lack of justice is then used as justification for destroying those institutions which do stand for rule of law in the US. In that way, those focused on this supposed lack of justice manifest their own fears.
Nytimes does not support 1st amendment. How fucking disgusting. Death to you all.
Ignore the NYPost for the moment.

A US government website put the details on their website. Twitter is now blocking the US government webpage hosting the details. They are blocking actual politicians linking these details. https://twitter.com/CongressmanHice/status/13167418079595724...

Worse yet, they have highlighted the exact opposite story. They are featuring washington post who are calling it false.

https://twitter.com/i/events/1316398754883272704

I'm not an American. Any Americans want to weigh in on your views of this?
No, it shouldn't.

It's a call for handouts for OSS.
Google reCAPTCHA alternative with focus on privacy
Discussed on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24341535 (477 comments)
I am an Egyptian. When I were young, they told us that Sphinx's nose is broken because it was shot in the 73 war.
Deploying Streamlit apps using Streamlit sharing
> It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels

I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.
I subscribe to Youtube Premium. It's handy if you use Youtube a lot and dislike ads.
"It's the perfect play!"

That show is so on point sometimes.
If they are growing rapidly then that would be the primary issue.

Secondarily is a new kind of emotional injection from a wave of new retail investors. This happened in the .com when retail started in earnest with online trading.

And of course 'a kind of inflation'. The Fed is printing money like no tommorow, there's more money chasing fewer deals, very low interest rates. See: home prices.
Yeah but when I click "more" it's just a link to "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782944&p=2"

So I'm saying just add convenience links to `p=2`, `p=3` URL queries at the top of the page.
If we're going to require intelligence for the whole system to succeed, we're setting ourselves up for failure. Half of everyone is below average.

> The difference between Orwell and Stephenson is that Orwell spent time as a police officer in Burma, and a solider in Spain. Stephenson does not understand the corrupting influence of power...

So you're saying Orwell has practical experience, such that one should weigh his musings on the subject more highly, while Stephenson is some rando expositing from a place he doesn't understand?

Fascinating. What happens if a bunch of people just disagree with your argumentum ab auctoritate and accept Stephenson's musings anyway? That would result in a bad outcome?

Should we have a mechanism in place to tilt people towards Orwell's interpretation over Stephenson (such as, hypothetically, putting one and not the other on the required reading curricula of schools)? If not, what happens if the Stephensonian interpretation of risks wins out?
I don't think you get to write off work expenses as a W2 (ie, hourly or salaried) employee in the US. pretty sure only independent contractors get to do this. otherwise, everyone would be doing this for commuting expenses.
Is this like Opera Mini?
I don't think this is a resolvable conflict in general; one person's division of labor is someone else's helplessness.

I think it's crazy that some people don't cook. Like every house and apartment comes with a kitchen, what do you mean you don't use it? "It's so much cheaper" I say ignoring the fact that I'm a cooking and baking enthusiast and so I'm not counting the fact that if I valued my time at any reasonable rate it's really not.

It's the same thing in the woodworking community -- "you'll save so much money, anything you see in the store I can make half as good, for twice the price!"
Or that Telco who had an API that couldn't handle more than one concurrent request per minute, and will fall over if I did more than that. Throw in FTP for extra complexity..
Integration challenges are hard. Makes sense for Stripe to buy someone who has solved it.
My First Experiences with Forth
Greater difficulty / risk in development leads to fewer, higher quality applications, but breadth not depth wins the market, so we're stuck mourning dead systems with potential except for cases where depth results in a "killer" application.
We have flying cars. They are called Helicopters.
Thanks a lot! I didn't know this existed! And luckily, not just in the US. Sadly, they don't offer something like this for Lasers, as it seems.
> There's often no way of knowing whether the lecture is being given by a college physics professor or a 9/11 truther, except by examining the contents

Exactly this.

Your points about extremist content stand as well. We've countless examples of NGOs that fight extremism, that get their content taken down due to algorithmic monitoring.

AI aren't capable of this sort of nuanced decision making and there is no evidence that they're going to be capable in the near future.

The only method to achieve consistent, quality content monitoring involves human eyes backed by qualified human judgment.
The hardware has to handle this case for misaligned loads and stores.

Are load and store (multiple or misaligned) atomic? If so, then hardware has to check things in advance and trap. If not, then there is a possibility for some part of state to be lost.
Can you expand on this? I’d like to read more. Do you mean you’d like 40GB/core/second, or something else?
Entirely possible; here's a vid of someone getting to 1800m.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-Iwv5NJKg
This idea of the future of work being permanently changed is really prevalent right now. It’s not going to be. Future of work, that is.

We’re in the middle of the storm right now. We’ve all been bailing water for 7 months or so, and lots of people think that we’ll be bailing water forever now, even after the storm clears.

I’d wager that within a couple years at most of COVID being squashed, most if not all the companies declaring themselves remote-first and remote-permanent will reverse those policies. Despite the added costs, there are just too many advantages to offices.
Isn't this basically the same thing as Regus?
Their 30-day auto-close policy is ridiculous. I've run into at least half a dozen bugs in Terraform providers, dutifully gone to report them, and found them auto-closed by the bot. How are they ever going to be addressed with that attitude? At least acknowledge that you don't care and aren't going to fix them.
So, if one person activates the hotspot feature on their phone,
does it render this inoperable?
Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride
I think this would backfire. The cash cow contracts will be viciously defended, and OSS will invariably be labelled "socialist" or "communist" (at it is socialist at a fundamental level).

Essentially it will politicize it, probably to a degree it has not been publicly subjected to.

And OSS has little to no professional PR to defend it, at least in relation to the vendors that will employ armies of PR flacks.
I guess it's not surprising but I am super disappointed by some of the comments here that show a total lack of empathy for people who aren't like you. I mean, you love working from home? Congrats, more power to you. But the number of comments stating that "only people who are good at office politics like going to the office", "only incompetent managers need to see you in person", "your co-workers aren't your friends", etc. are, as I would generously put it, tone deaf.

For many (most?) people this has been the worst working situation of their lives, and attempts to minimize that are insulting. I believe it will be especially bad for those early in their careers, trying to find their footing, get mentorship, and build their network.
'Brain fog' following COVID-19 recovery may indicate PTSD (UCLA Medical Oct 2020)

https://www.uclahealth.org/brain-fog-following-covid-19-reco...
I'm single, and transition to WFH has made a great improvement to my social health.

Sure, all people need social interactions. But these interactions don't need to be defined by work. I work in caffe 10 meters from my apartment. Sit with laptop in the park. Meet with friends. I don't drive, don't use public transport, but walk an awful lot.

And thanks with great, mostly asynchronous communication at my workplace, I sleep as much as I want to, and work exactly when I feel like it, and never ever hear or see my colleagues — only text, mostly comments as opposed to instance messaging. Sometimes I just slack off for three days straight. Sometimes I go into work binge for a non-interrupted 20 hour refactoring session. Not even because there's some deadline, feeling of responsibility or any other kind of negative motivation like that — just because I enjoy it and don't want to stop!

I feel like I've been on vacation for the last three months, and yet repository stats show me that I'm more productive as I've ever been.

Oh, and the best thing about all of that? I live in a country with much lower cost of living than US, but thanks to headlines like this, I feel that I'll soon be competing for exactly the same jobs and salaries that SF engineers.
Its VNC all the way down. Since tech trends seem to go in cycles and rediscover reasons why shifts occurred in the first place, give it another 5-10 years for people to realize providers managing everything isn't always (or even usually) in their best interest. It's only in the financial interest of those pushing this path forward. Its IBM, all over again.

On the bright side, somewhere in the swing from personal computing back to centralized computing models, I feel we hit a nice balance that made sense. Leverage the benefits and competitive marketing in personal computing when needed and aspects of centralized computing when it makes sense. Neither extreme is really all that great. Let's hope we can find that nice balance point again because where a bit too heavy on centralized computing IMHO.
The $16T Virus
Isn't that exactly what WeWork's business model was?
The one thing that it would do is to eliminate the search for a well supported printer on linux, as you would know that the open source ones were well supported.

The situation that always seems to happen to me is I need a printer ASAP. When shopping, I might find support for the Brother HL-2270DW in linux, but my local store might have a "Brother HL-2275DW" in stock (made up model number). So I'm wondering if the driver for the 2270 will work on the 2275, etc.
Who's responding to an accusation? I'm mocking someone who's more concerned about cats than about humans. That makes no damn sense.
No, they aren’t saying that.

They are saying ‘when we ask you to stop doing something unethical, don’t try to make us look bad for making the request’.

However, I agree with Gruber on this - it’s wrong for them to try to stifle discussion about their rules, whatever the context.
Why bother to build awesome free software that works when you can charge 8, 9, 10 figures and deliver nothing
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Here is a video of a "Superman" drone. Could be something like this, but I doubt this particular one could fly that high:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgACwfl6FBI
This is so awesome to see! I've been a streamlit user for past few months. Building out things have been a breeze, especially without pulling in javascript to build out ML frontend applications. Kudos to all the folks at Streamlit!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/04/13/what-to-expect-fo...
I mean that's already true. The kinds of skills that people talk about in these threads are typically very domestic. Even if you had all of them you still probably have a few skills that can bring in money if you're lucky.
My own experience with this was that once I included a description of an OS bug I worked around in the changelog of my apps and the reviewers made me remove it with almost exactly the same verbiage–I can’t remember if they actually said “irrelevant” but the summary was “this information is not useful to your users” (edit: I tried to go look this up but App Store Connect is down at the moment :/). I claimed it was, they wouldn’t budge, I took it out. Apple claiming the inclusion of things that make them look bad being “irrelevant” is sadly a known practice for many years and one of the worst ways that the App Store can stifle people from even talking about highly relevant information Apple doesn’t particularly like.
> I have no doubt that it's easiest to wait, have somebody else develop the market and then buy them. But it also costs a lot of money. Is not having to figure out how to work with M Pesa worth $200m?

I think that would depend a lot on your scenario. If you're not currently doing business in Kenya, the ability to accept payment through MPesa is probably worth close to $0. If you're operating in Kenya, the ability to accept payment through MPesa is probably quite high.

My takeaway from this is that the ability to accept MPesa payments is one part of a system that, as you say, can be incredibly valuable and worth lots of money. It's just possible that it's only worth anything in a context where accepting MPesa is valuable.

Regardless, international expansion is not something to be taken lightly. It's perhaps not always as simple as the local market being the same as yours modulo a few minor local quirks.
There is a key subtitle: "Early tally shows sharp enrollment declines at community colleges and among men".

This isn't about the rich/elite/high end schools seeing enrollment dip. It's about seeing the poor and middle class get pushed further back. And the dip among men is particularly worrisome, since it will set them further back in education, leading to further radicalization in this group.

We should not be celebrating this as the "death of academia" - what this is, truly is, the death of the middle class.
"Conservative" has become such an overloaded term that it's useless. IMO Biden is the most conservative candidate in this race.
Because of FED's QE
The school's fix for my boy's ADD? Give him more time on tests. Make him sit longer. Of course it was pointless and cruel.

A working solution would have been, to break the test up into smaller pieces.
The SaaS business model is just such a growth machine. If you have limited churn, expansion with existing customers, and sustained high growth you're going to be making a lot of money down the road. There's just so much lifetime value from SaaS customers and although the initial revenue is low per customer, it snowballs over time as more and more customers are added and services expanded. $CRM is a prime example of this phenomena.

It's also hard to use traditional metrics like EBITDA in a fast growing, expanding SaaS company. So much is based on future growth and revenues and getting over that hump to where the business becomes a raging cash geyser. Some will make it and some will not. But no one really knows who will make it and where they'll tap out today. For all we know many of these companies are unbelievably undervalued.

Additionally, I think there's a belief that there will be consolidation and many of these SaaS companies will be acquired. This has happened to an extent. Hell, the Mulesoft acquisition looks like a bargain today.
Should he is a moral question that I'm not interested in arguing on HN, but I doubt he practically would have been. Especially if he'd done so anonymously, obviously.

He also probably could have avoided being fired if he apologized and clarified that he did not realize that his musings on the subject could create a hostile work environment. He instead chose to double down that he'd done nothing wrong.