skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pre-Pandemic I started seeing them in the re-branded Amazon/Whole Foods Market in Santa Monica. They replaced all the traditional paper price tags with tiny e-ink displays. I assume that this was to reduce the amount of labor necessary to handle price changes and sales.
Show HN: 100 LOC Ruby forward proxy using only standard libraries
Using Bayes Formula to Get Startup Idea Chance of Success
A recruiter can be an ally. A friend would tell you things the company didn't want you to know.
We need to convince the serfs, not the lords. The lords can keep lording alone, it doesn't matter.
This is always a matter of degrees, and most jobholders have much less freedom to choose than your line of questioning assumes. In general, and especially for those people, maybe this is a good mental model for how to operate in a workplace. Power imbalances may actually be so unequal.
I use https://wakatime.com to automatically track the project and task I'm working on. It's a plugin in your IDE, so it can detect your project.
yup true that
And since the first in the thread asked about money, which is an important question, Amazon has a 600 million dollar CIA contract before counting the billions in IC contracts this year to big tech. That's more than double what Bezos paid for the whole Washington Post to put things into perspective.
I think you are, deliberately or not, leaving out important context (e.g. Twitter did remove the tweet from the Malaysian ex-prime minister), but regardless, even if I fully accept your point that Twitter and FB don't apply their rules fairly, you're still left with the fact that the only people who really need a "free speech" social media platform are folks that are mad that they can't demand the killings of millions or that they can't display fake severed heads. And literally every one of these "free speech" platforms (Parler, Gab, Voat) was immediately turned into a cesspool of conspiratorial rantings, hatred and racism.

Voat was probably my "favorite" of all. Literally the only reason it got any traffic were people were mad they could no longer post to r/fatpeoplehate.
There are three tricks to chopping an onion quickly:

1. A sharp knife. This is a must for just about anything in the kitchen. While the price tag of a name brand German or Japanese knife might scare you off, a $5 Kiwi #171 knife from Amazon or eBay can serve you well, and will kick the pants of the knives found in a lot of home kitchens.

2. Don't cut the root off until the very end. If this were a decade ago, I'd write more about technique, but the reality is you're better served by watching a few someones do it on youtube than reading what I type.

3. Practice.
Hey, I wanted to respond to your comment from 18 days ago but responses there have already been disabled (so I'm hijacking this comment). The question was about "> Housing market returns are very bad. Between 1948 and 2004 the real increase in value in the U.S real estate market was less than 1% a year." versus the "Return on everything" paper from 2018. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585224)

On page 85 of the paper, they actually point out that the real capital gain is ~0.7-0.9% per year on average (with a huge standard deviation of 8%, since it's very market specific), which seems to agree with the submitted article, but that the rest of the return, 5.33% (stddev: 0.8%) comes from rental yield (of course in the case of your own house that becomes money saved from not paying rent). Those two added together are what give the total rate of return on housing.
Ask HN: Why was the option of military grade masks never taken seriously?
At first, the production could not be ramped up fast enough. I get that. But the option of distributing proper, sealing, high filtration efficiency military grade masks and filters to the entire population, as ridiculous as it might sound to some, would have completely halted the spread of the disease and most importantly kept the economy and societal bonds active. It would also have been much, much cheaper than what most governments did in the end.

The only reason I can think of that would put this plan out of public dialogue is because it's sounds ridiculous to the average person. Is that the case?
Social Security works because the federal government just needs to print checks. Well some contractor prints the checks. But will the government be responsible enough to fund social security sustainably into the future?

The US Space program is falling apart with NASA's SLS rocket failing basic tests and costing $20B. Oh and James Webb being delayed years and costing $10B (if it even works). The only bright light in American space programs is SpaceX and JPL.

The $750B a year military machine is a huge waste of money which deserves a post on itself. Here's a terrible waste from Biden's Defense Secretary nominee https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-austin-us-trained-sy... $500M for 4-5 actual fighters.

I'm ok paying police and firefighters at the local level. The government bureaucracy gets worse and worse the further you get away from local government.

I can go on.
In the end, I think it really depends on your expectations what the role and responsibilities of a HR actually are.
nice touch, fragility and resilient
I always love a good HR rant :-). At Google the "people person" was called your "business partner." I like the notion that they are the inquisition though, that metaphor includes the adherence to dogma at the expense of common good.

There are also people who enjoy "the game." That being the corporate politics of "gotcha" and "praise". When I got to the place at Sun where I had some "influence" and people started trying to cultivate me as an ally, it really annoyed some of them that I didn't play the game.
I am always terrified of losing my job. It's a fear I've had even though I've been a top performer the entire five years I've been professionally working.

Maybe it's because I grew up poor or because I think things are too good in tech and about to crash any day.

My antidote? $100k in liquidity. Preferably not invested in the NASDAQ.

If tech crashes, you can take your liquid $100k and move to Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, etc. In these countries, you can live well for a decade, sometimes even thirteen years off just $100,000 USD.

I know $100k isn't much and it certainly isn't the $1M - $3M people want for retirement in the US. But it's enough to have peace of mind.
I have never understood why people get so angry at assumptions by association. It is a very natural process that people do. If you find out that someone is best friends with someone you despise, you will automatically assume the worst about them.
I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac).

At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it.

I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then immediately removed it from my login items before the call even started. But after the call, there it was again in my login items.

I have never seen an application behave this way that was not widely considered to be malware.
Yea, whenever these HR stories come up I always think to myself: who are all these people where HR is part of their day-to-day? Maybe I’m extremely lucky. Almost all companies I’ve worked for, I’ve interacted with HR twice: once on my first day where they hand me a bunch of papers to sign and once more on my last day when I turn in my badge. That’s it! Otherwise they are totally invisible, and I have no idea who they even are!
Isn’t the solution to avoid cloud computing, stack overflow style?
the balancing act
> This might reduce take up. [...] if you live in Wellington you likely have stopped even thinking about the pandemic most days

It would certainly reduce the urgency of take-up, but I would expect there to be a pretty strong correlation between how well a city/country deals with the pandemic, and the proportion of residents in that region who think that getting the vaccine is important, even if it's a vaccine for a virus that's not directly affecting them right at this moment.

I live in a region that eradicated the virus a long time ago, but I still think about it almost every day because the world's so interconnected. It has had almost zero effect on my personal life since March, but the vast majority of my friends overseas are in unending lockdown cycles, and international news is almost exclusively about the latest death tolls or what the vaccine progress is like. It would be pretty difficult to not know what's going on.
Hmmm, it looks like they just ask people what they think it would rent for and use that number:

"If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?” [1]

So, I was wrong about this. I'm wondering how people might be biased, though? They could over- or under-estimate what their property would go for.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
There are coins that don't use proof-of-work (which is the main reason mining bitcoin uses this much energy). Other methods for the blockchain to work like proof-of-stake correct this problem, therefor needing less energy.
And #3 is about 95% of it, like most of cooking.
Yeah, if I am really focused I won't notice if music is on. Music is only helpful for mind numbing/very boring tasks. And helpful that those won't feel as boring, not making me do things better.
This.

So many Apple complaints boil down to "it's not Windows or Linux". If you learn the platform, little about Xcode/the dev program/etc is surprising. Perhaps slightly annoying in an extra step or two, but nothing too unmanageable.

IMO, the bigger problem with developing for Apple's side of things is documentation - particularly, for things that need to exist outside of Apple's "blessed" path. If you're just in Xcode, things will mostly work - if you're outside of it, it can be confusing at first, for sure.
I used to have the smashy oxo chopper. For a beginner cook it is great. I found that it produces inconsistent sizes for anything besides "mince" so yeah, garlic works, or onions for salsa. Nowadays I would recommend taking a knife course (or at least some youtube studying) and using the chopping time as a break from thinking about work. Prep work can be cathartic, and even if time-consuming it is not time-sensitive.

Edit: realize my comment sounds negative about that chopper. while I don't use it anymore, it's cheap enough and worth trying if you are on the fence or don't enjoy the prepwork.
Any different group with a semi-competent lord will absolutely destroy you and take your resources. You'll soon send around resumes begging for a lord to take you.
A less dramatic way to put this might be: the person who is paying the bill is the person who gets to decide. In a large company this may be some manager who controls the budget your compensation comes out of. If you’re an independent contractor this is your client. If you’re hiring a person to paint your apartment, this is you.

Arguably, this is as it should be. Taken to its logical conclusion the alternative would mean that nobody is entitled to make a decision about anything without taking a referendum on the matter.

Reasonable people will be interested in informed input from the people they employ, but it should not be surprising that in the end the painter you hired doesn’t get a vote on the color you want your bathroom.
Yeah that makes sense and it should also reduce any bias if someone ruins their image with first question.
Here on HN there's at least one horror story a month about issues someone had with Apple, from ever changing terms, to review process that takes for ever..

Looking at that pragmatically, if Apple are managing to keep "media worthy" problems down to about 12 cases a year they're doing an amazing job.
I would love to know where you're pulling the 10x or 100x efficiency stats on dictatorships, and what exactly are the sectors of the dictatorship that are more efficient?

Also, it seems like your definition of freedom has no responsibility attached to the actions. Yes, you may be able to do as you wish, but so can others onto you(especially if they have more leverage).
> Newsom/Getty

> Democrat party

You’re coming across kind of crazy with this stuff, maybe unintentionally.
This is exactly what the comment you are replying to said.
>In addition to the money argument raised in another comment, the Apple development experience is a major annoyance when all you need is a couple lines of JS.
>
>I have an extension idea; it's literally a single line of JS. However, to get it into Safari, I need to create a (useless, and empty) Mac app with a specific configuration in Xcode that'll allow it to appear in the "extensions" list in Safari. Then I need to deal with all the signing & App Store distribution stuff if I actually want to distribute it.

I've shipped an extension like this, and it took me an hour to build (which included testing), and then I hit "archive" and submitted it.

The signing pieces "just work" in modern Xcode if you have a developer account associated.
If you must choose and serve a lord in order to survive, is it really worth bragging about your “freedom” to choose the least bad lord?
My understanding is that it's not especially important to get the second dose within a particular window. A surgeon friend got her first dose and said she was planning to delay the second one for a while so that more first doses could go out to others, and that it would be just as effective for her if she got it later. She's also relatively young (under 40), so she isn't as concerned as some people might be.

Honestly I don't know how she can be that confident that timing of the second dose doesn't matter, since this doesn't seem to have been tested with COVID vaccines. Perhaps it is a feature of vaccines in general?
> 1) Japan is not built around cars. There are more trains. You get to walk more.

This is false. About half of the population lives outside big cities, where you'll need a car to survive. I don't see people's shape changes in the rural areas.

> 2) Food portions are smaller, making it harder to overeat.

I think you got this backward. Food portions are smaller in Japan because people's stomach is smaller. Junk foods are cheap, so it's still easy to overeat.
Moderate republicans? Have you been on Parler? Moderate is "I think universal healthcare is dumb, minimum wage is bad for business, we need more oil pipelines, etc." Positions that are reasonable and can be discussed using more reason. What's on Parler is not moderate, it's pretty much nothing but calls for a violent overthrow of democracy, to be replaced by a society where anyone they deem as a "liberal" can be put to death.
Gotta start small
Kids clothes is a major part here. My network of friends has kids older than my own. So they pass all the clothes down - some of them rarely worn. Obviously shoes, undergarments and socks are an exception. Almost everything else is fair game.

We have rarely bought our kids clothes.

On the flip side, we had bought a new crib when my first one was born. It lasted through our 2 kids and now with a family who uses it for her grandchild.
Things You Need to Know Before Building a SaaS Application Startup
The single biggest difference between Japanese and American diet is the amount of food. Just going for US servings to Japanese servings is enough to shed quite a bit of weight, although you are likely to go hungry if you are used to American sizes.

Otherwise the Japanese diet is indeed carb heavy (rice, soba and udon), but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I'm gonna be a pedantic Portuguese speaker and point out that they should've named it Parceira.

Amigo parceiro.

Amiga parceira.

To be clear, I mean to this lightheartedly. Great work!
To be honest, every single time I dig in to a conservative complaining "they are singling me out for my views!!" I do more research and find that it is 99% bullshit. Not 100% bullshit mind you, because it's that 1% that is nominally true so they can leave out the rest of the context.

Here is a more complete discussion of Prager's charges of censorship, and in my opinion they are laughable: https://reason.com/2019/07/18/dennis-prager-who-boasts-1-bil...
Awesome post thanks! Did you end up buying a SAAS? Are you running it now? Would be cool to have a SAAS purchase checklist :)
plotting significantly poorer and underdeveloped countries against rich countries is rather pointless.
I'm interested in the Apple Watch but I'm very wary of the distracting properties.

Are there good features to help lower the distraction level? Do you find it useful (and worth the price) for the passive health tracking stuff?
What Is Guix Really?
NXIVM
Isn't that because of this? I guess it could be improved by making a better waveform for that specific display? I'm not saying that's a trivial task.

https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-waveforms-are-a-c...
Can a neutral platform with algorithmic feeds exist? Self selection + optimization will result in feeds reflective of the community rather than some neutral standard.
The book goes into great detail about programming VGA GPUs. MCGA Mode 13, “Mode X” and a few other variations. I read the precursor to this book when it was new and programmed for GPU that I had back then.
Overcome That Feeling of “Blah” with Your Writing
When HR believes that their main job is to administrate, then they have failed the company. HR’s job is to fuel growth by finding ways to make teams more efficient, effective, and enjoyable. Lots of admin work, but also a lot of strategy. That can be relatively easy at very well funded start-ups, it can be very hard after the 2,000th hire, and impossible at any size if your underlying company culture and/or C-suite is broken.

A lot of the points in this article are valid and are worth understanding. We should take an equal amount of time trying to work on a vision for what HR should be. A lot of start-ups build the product but not the company. A good founder should have at the minimum a lucid vision for HR.
Agreed, I have friends who were traveling to and from Osaka and Tokyo frequently, and even though the current journey is around 3 hours vs 1 hr for the planes, they still preferred the train since you don't have to deal with security, nor go to a far-flung airport, nor have to be in cramped seats, nor ride a car at all, plus the environmental impact is far less [1].

[1] https://global.jr-central.co.jp/en/company/about_shinkansen/
If I recall correctly he talked further about this in one of his autobiographies (Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman possibly?).

It was about the repeatability of counting to a minute, and he experimented on the difference between seeing a timer tick in your minds eye and hearing a count increment in your head.
Of course not! Bitcoin paved the way for these other crypto currencies. Bitcoin has huge scaling problems. An exorbitant amount of energy use, high transaction fees, slow transactions and etc. Other coins are fixing these problems and becoming ideal for day to day use.
Good intel. They've been throwing throwing in Teams as a free service and building a massive enterprise moat that will be impossible to disrupt. Slack, which started out with a NY Times full page advert welcoming Microsoft Teams, ran to Salesforce unable to compete.

Imagine Microsoft being able to connect your Teams activity, Edge browser activity and Windows 10 usage to your linkedin profile, github profile (all owned MSFT properties) using a singular Microsoft account, within an enterprise. Microsoft, as a corporation, will have the ability to see the inner workings of a company and build an inter-enterprise social graph.

A very ripe target for NSA fusion technology.
I wonder if twitter used so much hardware when it was on rails.
Don’t make it a slippery slope then! Why dress up hate speech, harassment, threats of violence, doxxing as “not prescribed speech” like there is no possible way to separate them from all other forms of communication?

Arguments like this are the oil that makes the slope slippery. If you’ll be exactly as mad when someone “censors” harassment verses when they censor opinions they don’t like you send the message that they might as well just do that then.
I'd add the NWS to that. I don't know of a better place to get weather information and forecasts than weather.gov. Perhaps it's just a lack of ads on the website compared to every other weather site.
Ready/Valid Protocol Primer
Seems like there's a lot of proposed high speed rail projects around the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_high-speed_rail_by_co...
The idea has some attractive features. This implementation (by whom? affiliated with whom?) would have to be around for quite a while and visible without a log-in before I'd bother. Especially considering all the filters I had to forego to even see it.
The long future of artificial intelligence
Pandemic expert Zeynep Tufekci made a very similar point recently: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent...

I doubt, however, that better masks would have "completely halted the spread of the disease" since many people still would have refused to wear them.
That might be the whole reason: Once you're interacting with HR, you usually do so because you have a problem (you did something wrong, there was a conflict with another employee ...). In those cases, you're far more likely to not have a good experience (I presume).
What is a "login item"? Sorry, I dont know about Macs
I think the vaccine should go to people who want it the most. That way, on-lookers can sit back and take it once they realize that it's safe and effective.
Sure, but whether he was really any more evil than the average Roman Emperor is debatable. Eye witness accounts don't describe any of the horrors associated with him, and the other accounts are generally written well after the fact...and describe not what Caligula did, but what -people said he did-. A key difference, when it was common to blackmail a predecessor when your own ascension was caused by assassination.

Not really important either way, obviously, but an interesting side note.
The same can be observed for every person the company is hiring. But yet, there are exceptional employees who do really good work, even outside what is expected from them. I think it's fair that the same can be said for HR.
Yeah but like the people who are hustle Facebook groups and Craigslist generally are not
Remind me again what the government did?

The problem we’ve seen in America isn’t poor-quality masks. It’s half the population not wearing masks at all, and not honoring distancing rules.

I don’t know about “military grade” masks, but the point of masks is to prevent spreading viruses in exhaled breath, coughs, sneezes. I imagine military-grade masks are more for protecting the wearer from inhaling something toxic.
> Japan is not built around cars.

That's true for Tokyo and some big cities, but not true in the rest of Japan, which is very much built around cars with crumbling public transport.

As for food - lots of fried stuff in Kyushu everywhere you go. I'm thinking it must be the metabolism rather than the diet. However, yes, food portions are small by default. You have to ask "omori" to get the bigger one, and there are even bigger sizes offered sometimes!