skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The narrative between those two scenarios is drastically different.

Who cares about the narrative unless you need to raise capital again soon? The money you get in an IPO actually goes into the business, while the trading price of the stock has no impact on the business.
Wow, that's impressive considering that the author did it all on their own without free money from the government.
I think that "extra" claim is actually false and misleading, if you read the Factcheck.org article I linked in my response to same post.
> Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?

There are good lessons to be learned from both the successes and failures of other startups. It's worth taking some time to evaluate what others did right and wrong.

Most startup founders aren't dumb. They know that other companies succeeded or failed due to a mix of their own decisions and uncontrollable luck. Occasionally you see founders get obsessive about cargo culting in the footsteps of some company they idolize, but it's not really helpful. Most actual founders (not the wantrepreneurs) I know are reasonable about all of this.

What you're seeing in all of these articles and websites dedicated to success or failure stories is journalism. The authors want traffic, first and foremost, so they editorialize and glorify in ways that appeal to mass audiences. Writing strictly for actual startup founders is an extremely competitive niche because there are so few founders and they're all super busy. Instead, journalists target the broader startup community as a whole. That's how you get these articles designed to spark conversation and link sharing more so than conveying the most useful information.
Blind photographer captures images using sound-based device
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-94percent-of-co...
We try to prevent those as well, but we don't have half the country saying that seat belts don't work, or Narcan.
Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/these_are_probably_the_w...
Signup before I can do anything
... thereby leading to a more equitable system, right?
Well, no. A meltdown is when the stuff escapes containment and then continues undergoing fission, heating up and melting out of containment and into groundwater/the environment.

The drain tanks are shaped specifically so if the (liquid) fuel flows in, it will stop reacting. And presumably the whole apparatus (drain tanks included) is inside of a biological shield.

So a "meltdown" here just means a big hunk of solid nuclear salt inside the bio-shield. I think the idea being that you could just bury the whole thing in case of failure.
What more is someone going to tell me that they didn't get across in the first six months of this?
Probably not hard for you to guess that my experience is limited entirely to enterprise batch processing and data warehousing. I've heard of CICS, but only as a nasty rumor.
It's on a different level for you.
Murderers are sometimes caught. Our multiple decades of wanton murder overseas have only enriched armaments manufacturers and their puppets in politics and journalism. That's not a good enough reason.
I'm game. My background is in math and not CS, so I can't say I'm certain I have the prerequisite knowledge.
Apple’s Airpods Max is an insult to human intelligence
This is so intensely boring and stupid.

Firstly, you profoundly misunderstood the inclusion of Ferrari, hilariously trying to twist that into an Apple critique.

Secondly, Apple is selling as many or more iPhones than ever in Europe (19% in the EU). And Japan. And the US. And Canada. And Australia. And CHINA. And Singapore. And South Korea. Literally every rich area on Earth.

Contrasted with pjmlp's "only the US" (actually the HN "bubble").

This has turned into farce. Carry on with the nonsense.
> …I use it a lot more than I thought I would.

I can't help but be curious: What are you talking about?
That's limited to the US West Coast, almost exclusively.

You need to be level 7+ in a FAANG anywhere else in the world to make anything near that. And you definitely won't be there with "a bit of Javascript".
Impact of Weather on Covid-19
This comment would be really funny if it was a joke.. but I just can't tell what's real anymore.
I'm all for masks btw, just not a fan of the journalism around covid is all.
I haven't really had this experience. My Macs have had far more issues waking from sleep than my linux machine. I'm on System76 hardware though which is built for linux so could explain the driver issue mentioned in other comments.
Not open source but I'm working on a system that turns a DSL (embedded into Jupyter notebooks) into either c or c with opencl for a niche finance application. Not a huge project (<10k lines of code). Nature of the problem means that DSL can be very simple (it's aimed at non-programmers). This approach also means that could easily add other targets - e.g. cuda or wasm.
Okay, but how healthy is it really? Maybe I am projecting my issues onto other people but I often get less sleep when I invest a lot of time into my side projects as well as my job.
It's almost as if the word "standards" covers a whole host of things in a very, very wide array of policy areas.
> Networks must not have the ability to intercept device traffic unless the device administrator (not the network administrator) configures it as such

The device admin of an iPhone is Apple, the device admin of a non-rooted Android phone is Google, the device admin of a Windows 10 PC is Microsoft and the device admin of a smart TV is likely Samsung. Is that the point you want to make?

All of those companies have incentives to collect user data and are known to push user-hostile changes. They also either have known ties with the NSA or can be coerced via National Security Letters, making even the tired point about "defense against state actors" moot. Do you trust any of them?

If, say, Tencent brought a phone to market in the US that turns out wildly popular but happened to exchange vast amounts of data with servers in China, would you be ok with that?

Most devices today have locked-doen bootloaders, so I don't actually have a choice about the device admin for my device. The position of network admin can be abused, too, but at least there is a possibility I can fill this position myself or can delegate it to someone who I trust.

> Ultimately, your choice with uncooperative devices is "block the device or don't", along with "replace it with a cooperative device".

Right now there are huge market incentives to make devices ever more uncooperative. Unless something changes, the choice for consumers will likely be soon "tolerate an uncooperative device and don't block it - or opt out of technological progress altogether".

> That's fundamentally not possible; any mechanism usable by 'good' network admins can be used by 'bad' network admins.

This argument doesn't get any more coherent no matter how often it's repeated. Somehow the tech industry keeps arguing that the key to any kind of mandatory backdoor will leak with mathematical certainty - while employing that exact same kind of backdoor for their own purposes without any worry - in the form of forced updates and forced telemetry. How exactly can the same technology be a security risk when used by a government but a security best practice when used by a private company?

> We absolutely need full control over our own devices, but many of the people most capable of fighting for that control got complacent about it because a subset of people could hack around it with local network interception stunts.

So then what would be your idea how to gain control?
Modding Escape Velocity games was a critical part of my childhood and probably set me on the path of becoming a software engineer.

The parts in this post about the 90s Mac fanaticism are spot-on. I remember having many arguments with friends and neighbors that all were "Winblowz" users and my feelings of smug superiority over them.
Roblox and the Dispersal of Creativity
SFChronicle news story

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25389164
There are a number of strategic reasons to be involved in the middle east and none of them are stupid. Would you be happier if ISIS was running amok?
Good question, I'm afraid I don't know enough about either language to answer that.

The Sentient pages mention Prolog, for what that's worth: https://sentient-lang.org/intro/declarative
It's more like...

The first to buy one and change it. The second to tell the world that because it was him who repeatedly complained that the lightbulb should be changed, and he did help to grab a non-contact voltage detector and ladder while the first was working on it, hence they should be called "GNU/Linux" lightbulb changers, not "Linux" lightbulb changers, despite him not being the one who actually changed it.
> COBOL is extremely good at what it was designed for - data processing, and lots of it.

Well, the hardware that COBOL usually runs on is good for that, sure. And its usually (now) running legacy systems that no one wants the risk of reimplementing from the ground up. But is the language itself particularly well-suited to the task? I think that’s less clear. Certainly, I’ve never seen a coherent argument about how the language itself is superior to modern alternatives even for large scale data processing; if it was, it would be popular for greenfield projects in that domain, you’d think.
> Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not.

This is definitely not true. At minimum you placed span from 1020, which means middle age, feudalism, powerty before French revolution and after, industrial revolution which meant completely overcrowded housing.

Living in multi generational household was normal, expectation to care about parents was normal. Building new house at the time of marriage where couple would live alone was not the expectation - at minimum it would be unaffordable for huge parts of population. Plus your social system was family, whether in old age or in sickness.
7500 deaths per day are average for the US. 9/11 caused 3000 deaths. So the US will probably exceed 9/11 deaths forever, unless population size is drastically reduced somehow.
Very interesting and quite ... instructive. The lack of optimizations is interesting. One would naively imagine that treating, e.g., ints, strings, dicts, and lists special would gain some performance.
Torrents is the big one (for symmetrical connection). It has a bad reputation because it's used to distribute copywritten material, but I could see things like game updates being done via peer to peer.

If I ran a game distribution platform I would even go further and offer a rebate on subscriptions for users willing to share their connection. After all, they would be saving me quite a bit in server costs and would help for places that are far from my CDN.
But did it return the value being printed? That's the thing most implementations miss.
For those downplaying the scope of this, the death counts / excess deaths data is most illuminating.

This page has a number of good breakdowns, but here's the US chart comparing 2020 vs other years:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mor...

Can you spot the anomaly?
Crafting Interpreters has been great. It starts with an AST-walking interpreter (in Java), so you get to focus on parsing and the simplest form of interpretation, and then it moves to a bytecode interpreter (in C) so you get to learn about compiling to a more primitive target via a lower-level language (much of which should translate to a "real" compiler). Very approachable, has lots of side-context and an entertaining style. The language you interpret was custom-designed for the course, which helps a lot, and resembles a simplified JavaScript without all the messy parts.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I got front-run, because I did do some searches ahead of time. Oh, well.
>People cannot be trusted with computers. They install everything that crosses their path.

I think this is a point that people who advocate for breaking down the walls of the Apple garden don't adequately consider. The iPhone is not really comparable to the desktop computer you could do whatever you want with in the 1990s. It's basically an extension of the person, with all their bank, emails, locations, web history. To make it a truly "open" platform, it would open its users -- who trust them -- to these kinds of problems, and would need to somehow solve them for those customers in a way that doesn't run afoul of the "open" aspect that people demand. That's a tightrope that becomes very difficult to walk when the headlines read "Apple app let hackers steal bank details, enable widespread fraud." It doesn't matter that it wasn't an Apple app. It doesn't matter that that App was downloaded on a 3rd party App Store. It doesn't matter that the user tapped through a dialog that said "This is a third party app that doesn't have Apple's protections on it, be careful!" Those are all nuances that are lost in that headline.

It's asking Apple to risk the privacy of their users and their business profits, so that people can have marginally cheaper apps.

I think the only way forward, really, is the model where smaller developers don't have to pay a fee until they reach $1m in sales. That tiered approach seems reasonable; after all, there's no reason to let huge developers off the hook for paying their fair share to keep the system running.
Err... Let me Google that for you? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

It's a smaller number. Not sure why you posted this when you can search from your browser really easily.
I have a lot of good things to say about AirBnB, it's beautifully designed, the one time we used it, it was great. Awesome host and at that time, much cheaper than a hotel.

However I can't get over the service and cleaning fees, especially as they are added on the second page. I don't mind them, but why not include them on the listing page?

Not sure if it's an US thing or if it's something people actually falls for? This is a practice that is prevalent throughout industries, but one standing out of course is restaurants.
The menu price: 20USD BUT + SF mandate + service fees + sales tax + mandatory tips, the dish is actually at least 30USD ? Why not just put that on the menu? In Sweden for instance (and most of Europe) the price you see in stores and on menus is the price you pay. Someone starting the next AirBnB and just shows you the actual price on the front page that is on your statement of your credit card in the end, will be very successful (I hope!)
If Covid had originated in a less powerful country than China I'm almost certain we would have invaded them already. You can see it by the amount of "Chinese virus"/"it was made in a lab" rhetoric from the top to try and deflect from our shitty handling of it.
During my research phase, I was looking at job posts (in africa) on other sites and hardly any would post salaries. And also in general, most job sites dont show salaries. But a few people have asked for this and it would make sense even if just a few companies would make them available.
Thanks for sharing! I like that ic includes a hook for logging, which I think is an advantage over calling print directly. I realize for a lot of examples, they’re quick and dirty but I almost always end up setting up a logger with an stderr or stdout handler so that other handlers can also send it to a file if desired. This makes it easier to run these in production on daemons and such where your code might not have an stdout to print to.
I think it may perhaps not be a question of "right" or "wrong". It will probably be a jarring change for many people as it affects major chunks of their regular social contact.
We'll see what happens. I mean, it's possible that they actually end up going through with a complete exit on Dec 31. My guess, however, is that there will be ongoing negotiations for a long time to come. The UK is likely to be out but only in the sense that they don't now get to vote on EU resolutions. They'll likely make negotiations with the EU which end up putting them right back where they were (regulation wise).

That's my expectation at least. They may feel the full pain of a full exit on Dec 31, I doubt they'll want to continue in that state for very long.

There's also the possibility of yet another extension on the transition period.
It's like 200 kB gzipped for hello world with simple optimizations.

When you use webpack, you can use that ecosystem of space optimizers too.
> This is so intensely boring and stupid.

It's reality though.

> Secondly, Apple is selling as many or more iPhones than ever in Europe

Again: it's simply reality

The iPhone's market share in Europe fell 17% year-on-year in Q2, according to today's Canalys data. ... That 17% drop in sales saw Apple's share of the European smartphone market fall from 17% to 14.1% during the 12-month period.Aug 12, 2019

12 Aug 2020 - at its peak, Greater China accounted for 25% of Apple's revenue though that share slipped to 17% in the last fiscal year

Singapore, South Korea and Australia are rich, bust mostly irrelevant by number.

Europe has 700 million citizens, those 3 have less than 80 million citizens combined.

We were talking about computing though, in South Korea (the largest of the three) OS X is at 4%.

It's 8% in Japan, like in almost any other rich economy.
ISIS was created by our involvement in the Middle East. It was the direct result of destabilizing Iraq and Syria.
Triage via email notifications, that all of these tools flow into. I silence all messaging tools/apps (DMs, mentions, etc), and check email between chunks of focus work. If the issue is urgent, someone will call.
Small molecule restores muscle strength, boosts endurance in old mice
Yes, I'll echo my disagreement with the Cypress advice against the page object pattern - the advantage was always that the logic to get the element could be updated in a single place, and that applies as much whether that code is 3-5 lines of webdriver code or one line of cypress code.
Entity Extraction for MLKit
There are studies detailing how to do this. There are some uncertainties in which technologies will prevail when you get to the last few percents before reaching 100%, but 55% is neither hard nor expensive. Much of the tech is already cheaper than fossils.
Design is not my forte, but eventually I will figure out something. But yes I agree with this.
It’s hard to argue chat is a different market from office. IBM sold Lotus Notes with integrated IM (Sametime, iirc) 15 years ago.
Well, you don't get discovered by making elevator music. Instead, someone pays you to make bad music for a captive audience. Different pathway to "success."

Software is slightly different because most software is more a tool than is art.

However, this applies for software that IS art, for instance, video games. You should follow your creative muse when making a video game. Less important when you're making enterprise software.
Yes there ARE people that believe the virus isn't real, the same way there's people that believe the world is flat, but ironically I find your viewpoint about all the "stupid" virus doubters to be what's actually the real problem.

You'll say that Trump called the virus a hoax, or push narratives that imply there's actually any significant percentage of people that think the virus doesn't actually exist. You treat it in black and white, and ignore all the shades of gray and all of the extra dimensions to the issue. It's either "you're with me and everything I believe about every aspect of the issue" or "you're an evil stupid virus denier".

There's so much more to the issue than that, and 99% of the people you think believe the virus isn't real DO believe it's real, they just don't agree with you on how severe it is and how it should be responded to.
Uber, Airbnb etc. circumvent regulation ;)
Around 2 thousands people die every day from heart diseases in the US, every day (635k annually). Not in extreme temporary conditions. That's a standard baseline, year after year like that.

I wonder how many lives would been saved if we had mandatory 30 minutes jogging sessions, fastfood lockdowns and vegetable subsidies.
HN is a liberal echo chamber when it comes to politics. I added that because any non-left comment gets immediately bombarded with downvotes without discussion (the typical leftist approach to political issues when challenged).
You beat me to it. Look at deaths by other causes. Lots of "9/11"s every year here! Why is this being treated as if its dramatically worse than a death by other causes? Any death is a bad thing
The painting for "cure" is some burning cars, a bunch of people standing in a long line, and some people pulling down a statue of a man on horseback? not sure i get it
Evaluating map data inaccuracy? More than just a payment UI? Driver/passenger matching? Data analytics? (Doesn't that require information from multiple clients?) On the client?

I mean, you could push some of that to the client, but I'd understand why your app is gigantic and doesn't do app-ly job very well with all the background processing. And I'd be surprised the app hasn't been hacked to get at the analytics data, if not the payments.
Hey, it's an average -- be the exception! My mom has an incredibly close circle of friends, none of whom knew each other before they were 45.
> It shows how naive the remain side (my side) have been.

If it makes you feel any better, it's quite possible that a significant number of the Tory MPs who "fell for" this little trap were actually in favour of No Deal (perhaps out of apathy or a misguided sense of party loyalty), and just wanted the fig leaf of saying that they voted in parliament for a deal instead of No Deal.

Had the Remain side noticed or publicised this trap before the vote on the Withdrawal Agreement, those MPs would have probably just said "Well, you got me!" and voted it through anyway.

As for whether revealing this trap before the 2019 election would have made a difference, that's probably even less amenable to rational analysis, given that the Lib Dems increased their vote share by 4.2% of the national vote (compared to the Conservatives' 1.2%) but ended up losing seats (rather than gaining 48 of them).
He is onto something there. Bean counting is useful and companies cannot survive without good cashflow, but it should not become Mission A of the company, or engineering (and other) talent will look elsewhere.

If one company's de facto mission statement is "We want to grow our market by 8.2 per cent and give our bosses higher Christmas bonuses" and another one comes and says "Guys, we want to fly to fscking Mars!", chances are that people like Tom Mueller [0] or Gwynne Shotwell [1] will choose the latter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
I would love to join as well. Loop me in too, if there is IRC channel
Yes, because it will definitely go away if we all ignore it.
The pandemic makes the impact measurable eg

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/pandemic-reveals...

>availability in the rental market has bounced, with 41 per cent more properties for rent nationally and 92 per cent more in Dublin.

>In Dublin availability was almost double what it was a year ago, with nearly 3,000 homes on the rental market on August 1st compared to fewer than 1,600 in August 2019,