skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That actually sounds good. When you pay for something it implies that you might stop paying for the thing if you’re not happy which means the seller is likely to work hard to make you happy.

I would love to have paid version of most of the apps/sites I use. Not ad-free subscription but paid version where I can be the unhappy customer when I am unhappy.
Fossil poop shows fish lunches from 200M years ago
I don't know about that. Pretty much all cross-platform solutions are a rounding error compared to the first-party Swift/Java platforms. I can believe there's potential for another yet.
I feel like I'm in way over my head here, but how is it even possible to have mathematically uncrackable DRM? Surely at the end it's going to come down to a comparison instruction (or a few thousand of them), no?
Tank Encyclopedia Researchers Erroneously Banned from Google for “Terrorism”
> There are certainly cases of that being the truth, but if you look at the time constraints and all other details, it's hard to just blame the system. How do you actually fix the system?

Yeah, given all the constraints, I agree completely. My complaint is that there is a giant emphasis on testing in really scalable manners that take people and dialogue out of it. So which constraint is the system (the way things are taught and tested) most sensitive to? I expect that it's teacher to student ratios, which my thesaurus says is a synonym for money, simultaneously the easiest and hardest constraint to change :-(
Excellent point. We get to hear from and learn from people we never have been able to here.
Maybe I'm hopelessly naive here, but $4M cash @ 2.65 ARR, so ~$1.5M ARR. Isn't that a bit low for SaaS at 7 years? Then there is the mention of running at breakeven most of that time. There are solo founder SaaS businesses making more than that with 80%+ margins. As others have mentioned, you'd be better off working at a FAANG.

So, did something go wrong here? What is it about this analytics business that makes it so expensive to operate? Were all the employees necessary? Was the pricing or marketing wrong? Or is this just the reality of most SaaS?

I gotta say, this really puts a damper on what I always thought was a fairly lucrative business model, if you could make it past the early bootstrap/product-market-fit period.
Yes! Elon Musk is a perfect example of this!
West Wing fans are quite familiar with that.
I'm not saying that he should, everyone can spend their money as they wish, but just as a fun thought exercise, could a private, extremely wealthy entity do it? Say, could Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk just say "yep, I'll pay for all the repairs from my own pocket"?
Apple figures developers will still pay them $99/year even if they provide them with poor documentation, and unfortunately, it looks like they're right.
I believe someone like Paul Hudson and the work he has done can influence a language's adoption by nearly an order of magnitude in the language's infant stages.

I released a Swift 1.0 app back in 2015, and continue to provide irregular updates for it but still churns some decent income (to me). If not for him, I really don't think that spark of enjoyment would have happened. What he provided was two-fold: an enthusiast to Swift and the iOS environment, and also as a teacher and big source of documentation.
Ask HN: Do you run a dev shop/consultancy? How should I go about it?
tl;dr - s/w product dev shop, few months in business, looking for benchmarks/advice.

I'm an experienced engineer and product/eng leader. Earlier this year I started a software dev shop, after having been in engineering and product IC and leadership roles for over a decade. I mostly worked at early stage startups, so my consultancy focuses on helping non-tech founders build MVPs. I work with talented freelancers to do a lot of the dev heavy lifting and focus more on product/technical review/problem solving and play the role of the lead who gets it done well. I also focus a lot on finding new business.

I've worked with 4 clients so far but given that I work with founders/early stage cos, they haven't been particularly cash rich projects. Biggest one was 15K spread over 2 months. My margin has roughly been 40-50% on each project so far.

Those of you who've been in this business for 2+ years now, I'm curious how it's worked for you and what advice you would have for yourself starting out or for me. My goal is to build a healthy income (200k+) for myself. I'm not looking to build a $multi-million consulting practice but it'd be great to get to a million or high six-figures in billings.

How did you grow from a few one-off clients to a healthy pipeline of new business? How does one outgrow this phase where business only comes from your network?

How long did it take you to cross $1M in billings/yr?

What's the typical client you work with? early stage? mid-sized/large companies? founders? are you focused on a niche?

I understand what I'm offering is a commodity service but I try to focus on my USP of bay-area based strong technical leader/fmr founder who you can trust with owning product development. This doesn't scale though - I can't be doing 8 projects. The easier path to the money I want to make would be to just freelance at a high rate but I am looking to grow this as a business, not as a solo practice.

Can you share your learnings?
Can't you just ignore the built in configuration and roll your own (probably there's a dotenv library?). That said, I've also personally moved away from C# despite really likeing the lanaguage due to a lacking ecosystem.

I'd recommend both node with TypeScript and Rust for backend web development in a statically typed langauge.
I wonder if there is a way to get Apple's attention. There's a lot of power in collective action. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if every developer who was unhappy with the documentation put in an email, a call, or a support ticket.
Oh man I had a great one last week.

We're migrating stuff to a cloud provider, and they wanted to expose an internal only API to the internet so that the things could reach it. I was strongly against that, as it has no security involved at all. Fast and loose and all of that.

Two, count them, two people wanted to "just change it to use port 443, that way it's encrypted". I had to explain that you could pick any valid TCP port to pass TCP traffic, but simply changing a nonstandard port to "443" doesn't automatically make it start being encrypted. I had to explain that several times in order for it to sink in.
The community isn't very fond of implicit conversions. That's why you get warnings unless you enable a compiler flag, and why Scala 3 downgrades them from magic keyword definitions to avoidable stdlib types.
A working alternative is google _meet_
#pragmas don't contain the code but just the "directives"

Agreed. I am using pragmas in my Ph.D. thesis. I think pragma should contain some information for the compiler and the compiler can apply binding phase for things referenced in pragma. No more. Having code in pragma is too much.
Why? Can one not be passionate about accounting?
Oh well I don’t normally have shortness of breath or chest pains in the middle of the summer. Also had extreme brain fog and couldn’t remember howto code (true story). Also was coughing for the entire month of may. Oh cardiologist said I had a heart attack and partly failed a stress test, but couldn’t find any reasons for a healthy man in his mid30s to have had a heart attack.

Pulmonologist told me I had lung scarring and I had to do breathing exercises. Hmm what else happened. There was also stabbing back pain. My feet and hands were tingly and numb for two weeks, I lost all feeling below my knees....

But the pcr and igG tests all came back negative. Doc thinks pcr test was too late and serology test was false negative. At this point I don’t care about the tests I know what I experienced and it matches up to other bad covid experiences

Forgot to add, I have pericarditis now and have been told to rest and go easy for the remainder of the year
Absolutely, but then they should assume control of operations to ensure a tight ship is run. If efficient use of funds is demonstrated, further funding (whether private, public, or crowdsourced) should follow. You don't want to encourage mismanagement of limited funds.

Edit: Upon further thought, I think it's an exceptional idea that SpaceX submit itself as an O&M vendor for NSF (and perhaps even NASA) RF/observatory facilities. Between launches and StarLink, they have demonstrated lean execution.

@ISL: Your point is noted, but SpaceX has a $50-100 billion valuation, access to capital markets, and StarLink is likely to be very profitable. I don't think it's fair to paint them to be in financial peril as they were during their earlier years. UCF's entire budget is $2 billion, and they can't scrap together a few millions dollars to properly care for Arecibo. UCF and SpaceX have each demonstrated their level of capability.
Please try to read posts charitatively, it adds up to better conversations. We all have limited time.

The point was that most people see torture plus murder worse than a quick murder, and that should be clearly analogous to your ironic cite, that I read as pointing out the supposed hypocrisy of making a slauthering “ethical”. Different ways to kill, be it human or animal, even if we agree they are unethical, are not unethical in the same degree.
I'm not naïve to the depths of depravity the human soul can fall to, nor am I blind to moral subtleties in life.

I'm just a consumer making decisions on behalf of myself and my family, and exercising what little power I have.

"We have a process" is little reassurance when every step of said process failed.

I have a process, too. When I feel safe, I board an airplane. When I don't feel safe, I don't board it and demand a refund from the airline.
Marco is right about PHP's documentation. I've felt for a long time that the quality documentation PHP provided played a major role in the language's success.
Charles Petzold is immortal!
> from a dedicated unprivileged user, so it can't do any harm beyond recording my conversations

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that, I don't really see the point in it, TBH.

Have there been cases of Zoom infecting machines with malware or transmitting viruses? The whole concern, as far as I know, is terrible security on their end, allowing people into calls without permission, not having E2E encryption, etc, and running as an unprivileged user won't help with that at all.
<code>
const a = "this is code";

<code>

```javascript
const a = "this is also code";
```

How do you code on HN ?
To the OP:

The very first question I’d like to see addressed in an FAQ for a “free” app or service is what the business model is and how the company expects to survive. If I start using this with others and the company goes bust in a few months, all the effort put into migrating people to this new system would be wasted. Their trust in me would also reduce.

The next question on my mind is that it claims to have end-to-end encryption, but why isn’t it open source? If it’s closed source for commercial motives, then see the first question above again.

I’m not comfortable trying a new app or service, especially one that would be used for sensitive and private data, without answers for the above. Maybe when this gets really popular and big I’ll try it, but not now.

If you have answers to my questions, please update those in the FAQ so that all visitors to your site will benefit from it.
Update: QSBS was applied here: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1326163478529314817
Does anyone have experience with this book/method?

I usually organize at the week scale, curious about peoples experience planning daily.
The New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartments (2016)
This is what I want to see: taking time to make large engineering decisions conservatively. A lot of vendors, the first thing you hear is it being dumped on you instantly followed by the realisation that it was designed by a closed team in isolation with no user feedback involved and subsequently it turned out to be crap or a complete impedance mismatch for the real world.
I'm excited about this! I've used .NET Core to build some CLI tools for Linux in F#. It's great to have an alternative to Go in terms of mainstream, high level languages (read: has tons of good libraries) that can compile to an easily distributed Linux binary.
I thought you said tinfoil hat isn’t an insult...?
There is a lot of money to be made working on iOS for big corp. hell, even small startups.

You seem to allude to indie devs though, so I can agree that it would be insane to attempt to go out on your own without essentially being a startup in your own right.
The stall warning stopped when the plane was too far into a stall to consider the data valid. I’d say that’s a malfunction for usability. It caused the pilot to keep pulling back because that stopped the warning.
> Online voting seems like such a simpler approach.

It is! Until you try to secure it. Then it isn't.
Yeah - was searching for a privacy-respecting contextual ad network for one of my side projects (https://lukerissacher.com/battleships), but didn't find much. Most ad networks have jumped fully on the surveillance bandwagon.

This one looks promising, but at the time (about a year ago) wasn't very established: https://contextcue.com/
This is a bleak reminder that prisons are a crime against humanity, no deserves to live in constant fear for their own survival. Not only that but prisoners are a very vulnerable population often exploited for labor, medical experiments and general abuse.
I applaud the author's transparency. Congrats on the deal!
>The article provides no link to the actual study.

They say that the study is in the Lancet Psychiatry. If you highlight "Lancet Psychiatry," right click, and search Google, this study is on the front of the site. Put in some effort FFS.

>Without any link to the study, this is meaningless information. This article is implying the virus directly caused those symptoms. [...] There's no mention of the effects a possible quarantine may have on one's mental health.

They consulted a medical expert on the matter. If you'd have read a bit more of the article you would have come across this quote from an actual psychiatrist:

“This is likely due to a combination of the psychological stressors associated with this particular pandemic and the physical effects of the illness.”

Oh, so the article actually does mention the effects that the quarantine might have on mental health. Did you just not read it? You could also have read the study, which does indeed suggest that the virus itself could be causing these problems:

"Rates of insomnia diagnosis were also markedly elevated, in agreement with predictions that circadian disturbances will follow COVID-19 infection."

You also conveniently left out that rates of diagnosis for dementia are elevated in Covid-19 patients, which is very unlikely to be caused by acute stress.

>Why is this assumed to be something the virus is directly causing as a symptom rather than looking into anything else?

Again, it's NOT just assumed that this is the case, and in the case of dementia, there's no evidence that the quarantine is even possibly a factor.

Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet.
Is that circuit switched or packet switched?
I doubt they knew he would make a blog post with this many details. But still, good will can get around through word of mouth.
It's more likely to be downvoting an unsubstantiated allegation of plagiarism which, in the circumstances, could easily be argued with public evidence.
I often sit and wonder "why the fuck do I need to feel the pain all the time". I'll literally feel it until I die. What's the point?

If it was a machine with problems, I'd just set it to generate a report/warning once in a while and not waste energy probing the sensors every second.

Remind me once every few hours that yes, my back and knees are still fucked (doctors' advice: just live with it...oook).

I don't need it 24/7 (OK subtract a few hours when sleeping without waking up because of it), it's literally pointless.
Yes, as in CRUD data storage. I'll join slack.

Good luck Asim, the project is kick ass!
> The US was founded on the idea that "all men are created equal."

No it wasn't. The US was founded on the idea that a king across the ocean can't tell us we can't expand beyond the appalachian mountains.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Proclamation-of-1763

The revolutionary war started because we wanted to take more land from the natives and the king forbade that because he wanted good trade relations with the native peoples. That's it. Everything else is just propaganda.

> I am Chinese-American, so if China were to displace the US as world hegemon and put Han people at the top of society, that would personally benefit me.

China will never be world hegemon due to geographical, racial, historical, etc issues. China vs the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, Canada, etc isn't even a fair contest. Not to mention western aligned nations like india, japan, etc wouldn't allow china to be a hegemon. Also, how would it benefit you if the chinese government view you as a traitor?

> However, I do not want that, as I support racial equality.

If you equate hegemony with racial supremacy, why would you support US hegemony? How about "no hegemony"?

Don't you think the world would be better if the US didn't have to maintain a world empire? The world wouldn't have to worry about invasions and we can finally start investing in american infrastructure. When I see the amount of infrastructure china has built the last few decades ( heck just the last 10 years alone ), I have to say I'm a bit envious. Instead of sinking trillions in foreign wars, imagine all those trillions were invested in new railways, new airports, nuclear energy, green energy, reviving inner cities, etc.
>~$1.5M ARR. Isn't that a bit low for SaaS at 7 years?

The median and modal ARR for SaaS businesses 7 years after founding is zero.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=185297

Probably doesn't work too well though.
The curious case of Wisconsin in 2016
If it's Boeing, I ain't going
I do agree

I just type IOptions<T> config in ctor, use ctrl+. and private readonly property and it's initialization is generated
I saw 'insolvent' on first pass and did a double take. Glad it's not just me!
DigitalOcean "pulled the rug out from under" Ryan Bates (RailsCasts)
It's usually the damned load balancer, though.

A firewall is easy enough to test with pings, telnets, etc. but the LB rarely seems to make much sense and it seems like there's only one guy who knows how it works and they never explain what they changed.
Hahaha! Nah, it's fine. Their suggestion was a good one; like I said, we did consider doing it. It's fun to talk about this stuff here on HN because the discussion is usually sensible. You should see the dumb crap they say on Reddit.
I’m confused as to what you want instead of what Asp.Net core offers. Nothing is forcing you to inject configuration or to use IOptions. In most cases you don’t even need to do anything with the configuration builder because that is part of the default of how the host gets setup. You’re configuration should be automatically built from environment vars and appsettings.json.

And of course you can always just access environment variables directly if you want to.
> People literally waiting to die in a nursing home are dying.

This is why I've said from the beginning that impact to life expectancy should be the metric which guides public policy. It accounts for lives of children being worth more than the lives of the elderly, because the elderly have less life to lose.
Live VR Workshop in Unity – Ray Casting and VR 360
> DI is the removal of complication when it is done correctly. (I have no opinion on whether ASP.NET Core does it correctly.)

I do, it was done in a really weird way and I don't care for the provided DI Abstractions nor the 'Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration' namespace.

To take the 'common' object used for configuration, the nuget package for IOptions<T> requires pulling in Microsoft's DI Abstraction..

That's the first sign of a smell. Config and DI can go hand in hand, but they should still be orthogonal.

The further you go down the DI stack, the more you can see that it's an abstraction has a lot of tradeoffs for front-line devs in the name of using the same abstraction for the underlying framework.
Couple goals!
It doesn't work. I've tried it on Arch and I have to force gnome to use X via a GDM environment variable IIRC.
My main issue with all these platforms supposedly being born to defend "free speech" is that they're a reactionist measure from certain ideas being deemed inappropriate by the common populace, so it's less about all kinds of free speech and more about protecting their speech.

I'm convinced that no centralized platform is able to provide true free speech and even if it does, people should not be denied of the benefits of moderation/curation so I do think distributed/federated platforms are the way to go, even if they have issues scaling up. True, in the end, they may just end up being bubbles and echo chambers, but you ultimately get to choose which ones to engage in, instead of leaving that choice to someone else and their fickle mood to appease shareholders.
I worry about online voting not being transparent enough
It’s trading one set of problems for an entirely different (and far scarier, IMO) set of problems.
It's not the people, it's the entire atmosphere. With companies like Zoom and Uber reaching marketcaps of like $100B within one or two years, can you really expect the people who are capable of building the technical infrastructure of these companies to feel proud of/satisfied with an income of $1k/mo?
Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership
> while Boeings are flown by yokes which are [mechanically linked]

They can still be disconnected with sufficient opposite force, there's a shearable torque tube between them.
I didn't design many buldings for myself, only a few which are not online. In a big office it's teamwork, there are designers, engineers, managers, detailers and so on.

The most famous I did was probably https://www.archconsult.com/project/resowi-zentrum-der-karl-..., some parts of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenig_Steinhaus, the biggest city planning masterplan in Vienna, Aspern,
and also the very first architectural VR and video visualisations.
Wonder no more! Here's a preliminary datasheet.

http://archive.6502.org/datasheets/wdc_w65c832_preliminary_m...

The part was never produced, in large part because Apple wasn't interested in continuing the IIgs line.
Y'know what, kudos to the author for adding screenshots to the readme.md - so many repos don't have screenshots which make it hard to work out why X is better than Y.
Now explain dementia.
Xamarin is huge in the .NET world and Microsoft is investing heavily into it. I know plenty of LOB apps, huge apps, built in Xamarin. I don't even know of a single app built in Flutter.
That’s a good point. I would be more inclined to argue that people, individually, would not pay the premium of ethical slaughter. But on the other hand there is a growing tendency to consider the impact of eating animals, to the point that McDonalds is adding vegetable burgers to their menus (as shared here yesterday).
> The primary being it’s easier to keep the documentation up to date ...

That's NOT a "good" reason in any sense.

That's a terrible reason, which no-one in a team leader or above position should ever sign off on.
Already a thing:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-companion-for-swiftui/id1485...

No affiliation. It's sad and a bit pathetic that trillion dollar company can't hire even one person to work on public documentation.