skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are steel mills down the road from my manufacturing business that were shuttered for decades and reopened when the tariffs came into effect. They were not competitive with Chinese government sponsored steel, that much is true. It’s extremely nice for me that they came back online; they order out of production precision parts from me for their heavy equipment. I’m located just across the river from St. Louis. This is middle America.

Most of my consumer products are sold directly, online, but I also sell titanium weed pipes to a local chain. COVID definitely slowed retail sales. I looked into getting my motorcycle parts onto big corporate retail shelves, but the margins are tight. I’m working on that. Business has been good, so I can afford to try new things. Cutting blanks with plasma rather than waterjet and milling steel with air blast rather than coolant, together, might make big box retail rational, for me.

The economics of manufacturing: extremely multi-faceted. There is a tendency for successful manufacturers to allow costs to escalate until flexibility is gone. Their employees unionize. Management borrows against the future. Then, the market changes.

It’s a rough game. I chuckle when people talk about the right to a job. Sure; that can work if I have a right to sales.
This is what’s some times internationally called a “service charge”, not a tip. It's part of the agreed price, not something I voluntarily add. The "price" is what I can pay and still return.

It’s effectively a part of the agreed transaction. I understand the mechanics of it, but it’s extremely weird to me (who isn’t American). I’d be fine with service charges of almost any level. Also if it said “service charge is 30% - please let us know if you aren’t happy with the service and we’ll remove it or compensate you”. That’s fine.

What’s important to me is that it’s on the receipt.

I wonder how Americans feel paying 0% tip without complaining in Europe (I wouldn’t ever complain and possibly not come back).
Yes, rather than exchange rate, I'd be more worried about corvids carrying trash from the landfill to exchange it to food. Or, in case of cigarette stubs, emptying well contained ashtrays to the tables and floors only to get to those valuable stubs.
> Unused disposable paper cups sold by 5 different manufacturers were collected from the IIT Kharagpur campus

While it still a valuable discover, I think it's too early to make any conclusions yet due to fairly limited source.
Stages of Grief in Small Businesses in Crisis
But if they where achieving back then what nowadays kids are achieving with python and js, they would be gods in that time.
> That's not how discussions work around here.

Yes, I know--offering obvious expository answers to obviously rhetorical questions is how discussions work around here. ;)

> I assume that those two hypotheticals were intended as counterexamples to the principle that being involved in activity that produces or contributes to harm is wrong even if you don't specifically intend the harm.

That's not the principle in question. The claim, AIUI, is that to not participate in a certain political cause--to remain neutral--is equivalent to joining with the opponents of the cause. IOW, "inaction is action," "you're with us or you're against us," etc.

> And, frankly, you sound a bit condescending.

Wow, two thought-provoking questions and a friendly statement, and I've already condescended. How dare I, right?

Keep HN'ing, mate!
HN uses voting to legitimize content of higher quality and tries to avoid political discussion. What you are doing is generalizing the non-issue of most platforms allowing the silent majority to express their opinion about other people's opinions. The funnies part about people complaining about getting downvoted is that no one is even removing or preventing you from speaking their mind even if they fucking hate the opinion. On reddit some extremist groups exist for quite a long time before they get banned. Firs they want a platform, ok, then they want to silence all opposing opinions within their small garden, and then they start going to other communities to harass and impose their content which doesn't belong there after which they get banned and restart the cycle.
The key thrust of this is that at Facebook specifically, the company is agnostic and amoral about the uses or effects of facebook, and the only goal is maximizing attention to be sold by any means necessary.

I don't know anyone who works at Facebook at high enough of a level to know if this checks out, but I'm curious if it does.
>> then who is selling bitcoin for tether and keeps the tether?

People who believe (in varying degrees) that 1 USDT == 1 USD.

In countries with strict capital controls (China, Russia, etc), USD is inaccessible to most people. And the fact that USDT has been trading at 1 USD for the most part is the proof that most of its users either believe 1 USDT == 1 USD, or they simply don't care.

In these countries, you have large amount of OTC desks due to lack of access to exchanges. Those OTC desks have to provide liquidity for large amount of trading activities (very large but I wouldn't think it's anywhere close to the 13b USDT that was printed in the last 6 months), and therefore they have to hold sufficient amount of USDT for that purpose.

Once you have a group of people (miners, traders, etc.), USDT could act as as a token valued at 1 USD among those people, and at any given point, there would be a significant amount of people holding large amount of Tethers. After all, the Tether "FUD" has been ongoing for years and nothing bad seems to have happened, right?
Neofolk
That’s handy sounding. There’s some use cases I was thinking about needing to read in high speed IO lines, above 1Mhz. SPI has odd timing requirements. Can you point to example code for this technique, or is it just a matter of using(abusing) the i2s library? And the horrible wire protocol is all too common.
IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems is available on the internet archive. It's pretty pricey otherwise.

https://archive.org/details/ibms360early370s0000pugh
What patents do you have in mind? If things are patented anyway, it wouldn't hurt to document them.
Golang can do this for the single reason of having no runtime dependencies whatsoever. Try it with literally any other language and you quickly find out that it’s no use crosscompiling to armv7 ‘in one click’ when your target doesn’t have the version of libc you’re targeting. The problem is not the compiler, it’s the build tooling.
Is Disney to thank for the takedown?
I wonder if this still applies to certified compostable cups.
The Perfect Dark Mode
async has another benefit: the mcu can sleep while the program is waiting, which offers an easy way to write low-power systems.
I recently bought my first new Lexus, and have to say it was one of the nicest experiences I’ve ever had buying a car. The staff were all no-bullshit, no-pressure, and all legitimately friendly people. The first service did similar to the story linked, picked it up from our home, gave us a loaner (higher model fully specced out), and left some decently high end gift products in the back seat when we got our car back, as well as it being detailed with a full tank.

In comparison when I bought a brand new “high end” VW that had major mechanical issues within the first few months (needed entire motor and gearbox replaced with 5k kms on the clock) they made me drop it in and get a taxi home, then tried to charge me extra for “storage” for picking it up late (I couldn’t get there on the day they said it was done). Similar horror stories for other dealerships.

Lexus aren’t the fanciest cars in the world, but what you get for the price and the overall owner experience after years of dealing with sleazy stingy dealerships has pretty much guaranteed I’ll always go back to them from now on.

Goes to show how far a bit of genuine customer care goes. Of course it’s a business decision and not purely then wanting to be nice, but it’s proven time and time again to create customers for life, and customers who’ll pay a premium purely to be treated like a human being.
Wow Matthew, I had no idea. Lee's story struck a personal chord - I lost an uncle to frontotemporal dementia when he was in his 40s and he lived with my family as the disease progressed. It's an incredibly painful experience for everyone involved, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. My condolences.
nice well done
Benefits of CRM in Growing a Real Estate Business
Over smaller sample size of 1 jumping to conclusions is not in good faith.

if the superboss has done this consistently in the past, then your wife's supervisor has grounds[1]. However with a sample size of 1 , it could be hundred factors and it is unfair to accuse anyone .

[1] Even when is there larger sample it is nuanced and tricky to really say, unless the superboss explicitly favours women there are inherent biases in the system against them, for example amount of mandatory maternity leave u.s. offers is pitiful, there are lesser women in STEM etc, the super boss selection criteria may be biased because of underlying biases not necessarily her own. Doesn't mean she should get a free pass, It should be investigated/reviewed before jumping to the conclusion of labelling someone sexist.
A big irony of course is that disposable cups were once good for your health. Since they are only used once, they're fairly sanitary, and were the great pandemic startup idea of 1918.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90520298/how-dixie-cups-became-t...
> Are there any tools that help limit bumping into news?

Yes. It's called "RSS".
Good read. It's easy to waste ones attention so gotta be careful.
I was like dexterdog, the only person in my school that could program. I toyed around with assembly and C and made some progress but nothing significant. I know people who went to other schools with a dozen or more kids toying around together, like you, and they made it a lot further during their school years, and this advantage has left them still very far ahead to this day, 30 years later.

People learn much faster and better in groups than as individuals.
> It seems like COVID-19 has been a killing blow for many companies.

It's been really good business for guitar stores. I talked to someone at one and this has been the best year in a decade, and this was a small, independent store that also has a web presence. Guitar Center must have been pretty mismanaged leading up to this. It's also been a rough decade for rock music--there just isn't as much guitar music as there used to be.
But in real life examples, the exact opposite has been playing out.

Instead of you being sold to the richest, hungriest gas station, it's more like all of the gas stations racing to the lowest price to serve you, and consumers having no brand relationships with gas stations anymore.

If Android auto was always serving up expensive gas, users would start using bing or apple maps - I certainly would if there was such a tangible cost difference
I’ve been following the advice of a dr who studies estrogenation and how that’s bad for both man and woman. He has a list of alternative products/materials you can use:
https://www.ajconsultingcompany.com/whatiuse.html#
an ultrawide apparently with text zoom at 120-110%. However, reading on my oneplus 7 pro is pretty fun too. PDF versions a bit inconsistent on such mobile formfactor but kindle runs smooth. The resolution is high, text looks sharp af
They did, together with their buddy Bandar bin Sultan.

Why exactly do you think they didn't bother going after the person who funded the hijackers directly, and actively hid this information in the 9/11 "28 pages" for years and years?
This is the good stuff and it was pretty neat, I would say necessary one some levels just to keep that kind of passion alive.
Yeah the cultural shift in that regard boggles my mind.

Most people don't understand the significance of what they're forking over. I wish someone would do a documentary where some creep follows you around all day writing down where you go, who you look at, what you buy, what you say, read, etc. and connect the dots for people about how today's major web properties are doing exactly that.

It's like how nobody really cares if some guy they can't see in a back room at the airport can see through your clothes but if they were instructed to strip naked it would never fly.

Once upon a time it was bad manners to even take a picture of someone without asking. I hate it when people indiscriminately point their damn cameraphones at me.

/end old fogey rant here.
> There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money.

You say that, and yet

> places to go

Travel is expensive.

> people to meet

If you live in a small town and want to start meeting people radically different from the people you usually meet, you should probably move to a larger city. Large cities are expensive.

> cuisines to taste

Eating out is expensive.

> things to learn, books to read

These are perhaps the ones that require the fewest resources, and even these require enough of a work-life balance that you're not completely exhausted by the time you finish at your third job. Depending on how your economic circumstances are, a healthy work-life balance might not pay the bills.

Now, for the upper middle class readership that HN is most likely composed of, sure, the costs of all these activities are negligible. But I think it's a stretch to say that a homeless person on the street should "get out there and really start living." To do that, they need enough money to get to a stable situation first, and the sort of money that's trivial for us to come by is not always so trivial for everyone else...
Why is silicone any better than plastic?
I was bringing reusable cups to coffee shops frequently prior to the pandemic. Wonder how long it'll be before that's feasible again.
You can also read Reddit post headlines, particularly in /r/politics, and train yourself to ignore the ones where the headline is a statement and not actual news. Unsurprisingly, this tends to consistently come from certain fairly biased publications that appear to disproportionately surface to the top there lately (I'm looking at you Common Dreams).

Cutting out all the fluff and focusing on news helped me save time and stress.
I would be willing to bet that assembly wasn’t the first language you learned.

The first programming I did was as a kid when I taught myself basic on an apple II+ after I saw a joystick and a manual sitting next to my dad’s computer. ...it looked a bit like my Atari console and I was curious. (I too eventually wrote assembly - you had to in those days - but it wasn’t the introduction to programming for anyone I knew.)

This led to other things, including the robotics company I started, where we are, as I write this, running JS on an esp32 (among other things), hoping to inspire someone else to discover programming as I did - through play and fun.

To me, JS is kinda like basic was when I was a kid. ...the first step on a path that could surely include assembly, ML, distributed systems, robotics, computer vision, etc.

But what should step 1 be for kids today? I have a 6 year old, and all I know is she’s growing up in a different world than I did. ;-)
Eicks! 10GB of disk space and 6GB+ RAM for the compiler? That’s seems crazy. No compiling that on most RPi’s. Maybe the cranelift project will help over time.
The Origin of the “MIT License”
I am hesitant to use plain JS on web applications now that I've been using Typescript for so long. I would feel even more hesitant to write fast and loose JS on a microcontroller
I don't think most people understand the company, even company insiders. (learn the origins of compartmentalization for some good reading) I think looking at the history and origins of it and it's key founding and early members offer the greatest insights into the structure learned mostly from MI6 when it was the OSS formed by a bunch of Wall Street banker-lawyer types who were pioneering the international law movement. Understanding the Dulles days in Switzerland is a great start, for example. Another technique I have used (for other topics too) is to find all the whistle-blowers and read their books and articles. Usually only a juicy tidbit or two is found in an insiders book, but when you add them up in aggregate you can form a larger picture many tend to miss. Many revealing things exist for those with the passion to seek them.

Be warned though, this is one of those topics that is not for the naive, or the faint of heart. When you start to understand the horror... I have seen more than I like retreat into ignorant bliss in response. Do you really want to know what the government is carrying out in your name, and the implications thereof? Do you really want to know what they have done against our own citizens, and even our top officials in other branches?

Knowing stuff like this makes you laugh at the politics of today, and the people falling for the Hegelian pendulum swing like clockwork. You begin to empathize with the elite and understand what their base positions is, which boils down to the question Nick Rockefeller asked Aaron Russo; "What do you care about those people? They're just serfs. Take care of you and your family."

Class techno-warfare will be the greatest struggle of humanity, even into transition to a type 1 civilization. Calling it now.
And that’s just a fact.
People put interpreters for popular languages into environments hoping to grow the population using that environment. It is an attempt to entice an audience of technically adept people easily, adding value to your environment.
Ask HN: How to interview a candidate from a direct competitor
I'm looking at some advice from people here on HN regarding a situation I'm currently facing.

We're looking to fill in a certain position which comes with a strong requirement of inside industry knowledge from the medical sector.

One of the head-hunted candidates is from a direct competitor and it's clear there is a lot of overlap between where our two companies are heading to (same regulation issues, etc...) and how we're solving these problems.

Would it be weird to have a candidate sign an NDA (personally I think this would have 0 benefits in the end and just alienate a potential candidate).

At the same time we're not extremely comfortable discussing real-world scenarios and issues we're facing as we would normally do during a job interview nor doing a deep dive in our hardware setup and configuration.

Any pointers how we can best assess the candidate without it being a risk?
This reminds me of bunnie's talk on supply chain security:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5519
Think about kids who are getting into programming through JavaScript because they have access to the dev environment without installing anything. Now those kids can work on building hardware as well using the same programming experience.

We aren't losing anything here.
There is no contradiction at all between the idea that something can be good for preventing the spread of germs and also basically poisoning you. These are two entirely different issues.

If you can avoid both at the same time, terrific! If you can only avoid one, avoid the germs. They will kill you faster.

(Ideally, you also work at reducing/limiting how much exposure you have to the thing poisoning you. Edit: One possible solution here is to drink your coffee cold, such as frappuccino drinks. Even in the same cup, it should be far less of an issue.)
The experience you've had with BestBuy sounds very similar to Argos here in the UK. They have local stores, some based out of supermarkets, you can see if things are in stock and reserve + pick it up within the hour. They're usually competitively priced with Amazon, they're open late, and they don't have fake items.
Silicium is certainly going to be a lot more inert than synthetic carbon chains polymers inside you.
They took out loans against their equity.
Maybe they are using some arcane programming tool from the 80s...

'{}' has the advantage that it expresses structure in a single line - copy a block of code from one place to another and your editor can throw it almost anywhere and the structure is preserved...

Modern day text editors all preserve indent wonderfully and can indent/outdent as a matter of course...but to some troll insisting on using ed or notepad or Microsoft Word I can see the difficulty.
I’m no scientist, but this always seemed intuitive to me with the plastic-like lining inside disposable cups (BPA?). There’s just no way combining this with near-boiling liquid could be good.

Of course, none of that has prevented me consuming as much coffee from disposable cups as the average urban professional type...
I was hopeful when I first heard of Ruqqus ("reddit without censorship!") but after a visit I just realized that it's too toxic place to visit without going mad. We humans make good ideas turn so so bad.
But that campaign cannot feature a party or politician. It can just coincidentally support same cause as party X.

Of course it's not a 100% fix. But it's a step in a correct direction.

edit: thinking more, it may be complicated in US where X always means party A and Y always means party B. Here we've a bunch of overlapping parties and there're multiple parties (or factions) behind pretty much any issue from any angle.
Looks like it’s built on top of OpenWRT.
20 years ago, pure black on a CRT, for example, up against pure white would have generated artifacts on many displays.

Similar things happened with TV programs. NTSC has low color resolution and much higher luma resolution. Large shifts around the color wheel, at higher resolutions, smaller pixel sizes, generated undesirable artifacts.

Luma changes generally didn't.

This kind of thing drove art direction toward more broad swaths of color, luma and gentle hue changes to imply texture and detail, rather than actually forcing detail.

Frankly, these subtle limits in display tech are all over the place.

4k HDMI does not have 4k pixel perfect color, or didn't last time I looked.

Discussing art in these contexts makes great sense!

For that matter, one might also say to avoid high saturation colors... many displays cannot even render them. CRT displays can, plasma TV can, and some new OLED apparently can.

LCD, generally can't.

Nature does present these colors to us, so... yeah.

I much prefer to talk about these things in terms of display capability, potential artifacts and such myself. It is a far more useful discussion.
I don’t think it’s either/or. In my organization people pride themselves of being 150% occupied. But it means they’re doing a half assed job at everything, kicking cans down the road just to keep afloat, and are juggling multiple projects at the same time. The bottom line isn’t much better than if they were 50 or 75% busy because the work quality is so low. We have to redo things all the time as a result. A colleague/close friend of mine is smarter and works at 50 to 75% capacity. Her output is very similar to overworked colleagues because he doesn’t have to redo things several times but a he’s far less tired and makes better decisions. The difference with her is that she doesn’t have a mortgage and her financial commitments are far lower than her income. She doesn’t fear being let go.
indeed hard to remember...
>If you're supposed to work from 9 to 5, why would you start earlier if it doesn't benefit you to do so?

This goes to the GP. A government worker doesn't see any benefit. They're career is basically seniority driven if there's any advancement at all. A private sector employee would be noted for their extra effort and see a bigger bonus/be promoted.
I've been enjoying your podcasts a lot over the last couple of years. Good topics, interviews and tone. Just wanted to give you some praise for a job well done.
Same here, at my previous work, they used python to generate terraform hcl. I told them you might as well use pulumi
What about agile did that?
Covid-19, duration of viral shedding, and infectiousness: meta-analysis