skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finally reached 2k MRR on an iOS app I built
During my senior year in college, I wanted to build a social discovery app that helped me find the most compatible people possible to pair me up on video chats with. I envisioned using grandiose AI at the time, but settled for a simpler ranking algo.

After a long, long tread. I've finally hit $2k in MRR. I use firestore w/a serverless set-up, and the app scales up nicely. My profit margins are over 99.9% (aside from the 15% cut Apple is taking from me).

Used SwiftUI to build the entire app. I hope to make more video chatting apps like this, but man was it a TON of work by myself. I had help from one designer with logos but that's about it.

It was especially hard for me to balance iterating on this with my day job (I only really had time on weekends).

I hope it lasts for a few years and I can bank $100K from it. That'd be pretty cool
Good thing being able to sideload an app also implies that you can detect and disable or remove offending apps.

Something Apple still doesn't let you do.
> Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform.

Why not? Even if you're right that they care more about propaganda than money, what's the point of propagandising to an empty room?
Dislikes are good not just for identifying bad videos, but also good videos. You can see it in the like/dislike ratio. The higher the better, videos with ratio around >98-99% have very high probability of being good etc
Found that my productivity - and that of the team I'm on -has gone through the roof since WFH. I'm on a fairly small team though (2-3 devs). I suspect that productivity changes are different in larger, more corporate settings where it is less conspicuous when a worker abuses the circumstances.
So if the whole world went to crypto (particularly one with a fixed amount) and something like the Great Depression happened what would the governments do to provide stimulus? Or is the idea that governments never do so?
They are opening the offices earlier in the year than they had planned.

Presumably the increasing availability of vaccines factors into it, lots of new information between Nov 1. and the last few weeks.
> The dollar isn't what's being protected, what's being protected is the entire economic system of the USA that is dependent on oil.

The two are inextricably linked. You could not run an economy of this size without a currency to underpin trading value and denominating debt. So defending the strength of the economy is defending the strength of the currency the economy is denominated in.
I was going to read the article first for once, but got paywalled. Anyway, sorry to hear about this guy's story, but at first glance I'm also not sure what could be done about it. You can't get Bitcoin back, and Apple can't allow more than a few apps on their store without a bad one slipping through once in a while. Putting your entire life's savings in Bitcoin and then entrusting it all to an app strikes me as similar to cashing it all out and keeping it in your car or something.
I am philosophically opposed to a system where by intentional design, everyone’s money is debased continuously. It’s weird and immoral. You are forcing everyone to be a mini-hedge fund manager, or hire someone else to be one for them, to avoid the government-decision of destroying your wealth. It’s just stupid.

You can have an economy with a single dollar, if it can split far enough. Printing new money isn’t increasing the total amount of wealth in the world. It is redistribution.
I wonder what kind of circular logic this could create. Clearly we don't need to lower the age of Medicare eligibility, because 64-year-olds never get sick. 65 is the perfect cut-off based on the numbers! /s
> Far away from Silicon Valley

This could end up helping much more than hurting long-term. Engineering salaries in the Bay Area are insane. Salaries for engineers in the US overall are very high. If you’re in Europe, you can likely afford 2-3x more engineers than your competitors for the same amount of $ raised.
$10 PAGE RPM is the key here people. Not a great metric to go by. Ad impression RPM is the number to compare. I'd be interested to know the average number of ads/page you need to display to achieve a $10 rpm. At any rate, you can get that on AdSense no problem with very little hassle and net 30 payments.
Probably because Biden supporters are less 'online' and there aren't that many dedicated supporters of his (as in there are more people who simply think biden is better than the alternative than actually liking him). Contrasted to a personality like Trump who amassed an online dedicated cult following, in which they would literally try to decipher every word he said for hidden messages from the God emperor himself.

In the same way that Twitter seems to be full of anti-capitalist anarchist communists, demographics of the real world turn out to be a lot different than social media makes it seem.
The implication of my post is that those wars were not "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation". The US could just as well not have not gone to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
No, I think everyone is probably equally terrible at detecting lies. Except for the few people who have actually been tested and shown to be good at it. Any other narrative is just a story - we're all pretty bad at guessing each others intentions.
> I no longer think the environmental argument is really plausible here. Clearly crypto mining is emitting using a lot of power and some of that is CO2. But the competition is fiat; backed by fighter jets and nukes; literally.

That seems like a non-sequitur. Proof of work crypto generates an astonishing large amount of CO2 to little effect. Some other alternatives are bad in other ways, yes, but that doesn't make the CO2 go away.

I live in a small, peaceful, stable country with a very small military and very safe banks. If you're really trying to make some sort of argument that fiat currencies can't exist without a significant CO2 expenditure to try and enforce neoliberal orthodoxy at the barrel of a gun then that is very obviously untrue.

> Instead it's protected by this mining fleet. And if you want to contest ownership there's no one to invade

So your argument is that nobody will steal my fiat currency from my electronic wallet (aka, bank account) because of the police, but nobody will steal my crypto currency from my electronic wallet because of their respect for pure math; no need for law and order?

Respectfully, you might want to try and develop that argument a little further.

> It's a small step in the direction of getting away from all these endless wars and control.

Key driver of most wars is resources, especially energy, not money. I'm confident that we are not collectively dumb enough as a species to end up in a state where we're fighting wars to obtain energy resources to fuel blockchain mining, but that is a thing that can theoretically happen.

I think you're falling prey to the is/ought distinction. It would be nice if crypto currencies could somehow create world peace, resolve the contradictions of late stage capitalism, cure cancer, <fill in your dream here>. But they obviously can't, and I would suggest pretending otherwise is pointless.
> Content creators of all stripes are absolutely desperate for an alternative platform

Peertube exists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
I think Python suffers from #3, as they've been adding new (controversial) syntax like typing, the := operator, and pattern matching. These were intended to help write real-world code at the cost of simplicity and applicability as a teaching language.
I replaced a 12V battery on my car this morning, thanks to a youtube vid. I didn't try any alternative sources, because the 2 minute video was perfect! And I didn't get sucked into any other vids or see any ads or anything.

My recent experience with iFixit was not great. I replaced a battery on a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina, and the tutorial included about 40 extraneous steps (that only mattered if you were using a certain, optional, glue removal goo -edit: and it was not referred to as optional, nor were alternatives offered. I used fishing line). I saw speculation that they intentionally made it seem more difficult so people would be more inclined to bring the laptop into a shop. It wasn't until I checked youtube, and saw a very similar procedure, that I realized the steps were unnecessary - via the comments! A few people noted that you could skip all the steps prior to 11 minutes in. And they were right.
In the short run they can get away with ~anything. In the long run though, anything that upsets users makes the rise of a true competitor marginally more likely.
The way people “invest” in the stock market nowadays is no different. Long gone are the days of buying a share for dividends and voting power. People now are just betting on what they will be able to dump the bags at the time of their retirement in a giant casino. Crypto is just the end game.
This is just a side effect of national politics.
Federal courts rules that the public has a right to information.

https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/a07ecc2a26

Despite that, Youtube is trying to counter bad engagement. Several of Biden's content team's postings of youtube content have gotten tens of thousand of likes, but millions of dislikes resulting in a content "ratio". Downvoters have not been able to be discredited as bots or automated activity.

This isn't a general policy. It's a very specific damage control and political advocacy cloaked in a generic policy.
Can you clarify this for me? I have always assumed that since I’m the one watching the video I’m their customer/user?
You can still save some time on commute that way ;)
I don't work alone. Most of what I do involves getting other people to change what they're doing. It's high-interaction work, for the most part. And it works just fine remotely.
You might be running into this: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/hostap/patch/2020082506... if your distro doesn't ship this patch to wpa_supplicant (AFAIK Fedora does ship it).
I was unfamiliar with the role of amines in carbon capture. It's great to hear that better solvents are being developed.
I agree. I wouldn't be surprised if someone thought the popup was the scam.
I do not have the citation handy, but in one study, they recruited individuals by enticing them with the results; e.g. if you take take part in the study, we will give you the antibody result. This would obviously bias the results toward people that believed they had the virus, but didn't have a test when sick.
It's easier, I agree, but I would not say its better. Collaborating online requires documentation, its more effort, but the artifacts you produce can be a lot more useful for everyone involved.
I find this interesting that the new economy Google is so set on office work where as Shell (at least in .au) is planning on staff having an office / work from home mix. They have even reduced overall office space so that they don't have enough spaces for all employees to work from some local offices.
It's awesome how the spring reverb is a sneaky way to somewhat simulate polyphony beyond 3 voices.
Close? Yeah no, I dont think so. The experiment was basically a complete failure. It just happens to be interesting to analyses what actually happened and why. Its also based on assumed condition on earth that are now consider extremely unlikely.
Of course they do, and this is why medicare for all is a great idea. It strikes me as rather perverse that health care is largely a for-profit business and that even non-profits (like systems associated with religions) are all about cutting corners and maximizing revenues. It seems logicl to me that health care be a right.
My side hustle is reading HN comments about other people's side hustles.

Hmm, maybe this one. Nah. Hmm, maybe that one. I'll add it to the list.
Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.
BundleWrap: Simple Decentralized Configuration Management
That's rather the point. Those metabolic networks are not meaningfully separable from "how cells and DNA work".
The analytics have no direct benefits to an individual visitor, like ads, so I get why you'd block them. I myself don't care about showing up in the analytics of the website I visit. But I pay for paisible because they are way less intrusive, and they get added to the blocklist anyway. This doesn't encourage good behaviour. From a website owner perspective, if I don't circumvent the blockers I need a server side solution. It would be equivalent privacy wise, harder to set up but less visible.
>To calculate the real dislikes on a video, we tabulate only increases to the dislikes, and ignore decreases. On normal YouTube videos (e.g., on PewDiePie's videos), the official YouTube stats and our real stats completely agree. On many White House videos, there is a huge discrepancy between official dislikes and our calculated real dislikes.

This might not be nefarious manipulation. YouTube may be removing illegitimate dislikes, such as from bots or sock-puppet accounts.
> just simply have lunch.

I thought I had to be in an office for this as well then discovered this entire room in my apartment full of mostly unassembled food.
Semantics, semantics, semantics, that's all your arguments are.

Soft and hard forks are a defensive mechanism against 51% attacks, essentially making them an always losing proposition outside of the immediate-term where the attack is occuring, because the attacker has to expend so much money, and then a simple code change could revert it, which would likely happen in consensus for the network if such a malicious attack would occur. Hence, no rational actor will likely even consider a 51% attack.
It’s the worst solution except for every other we’ve ever tried.
Google HR told me “data showed remote doesn’t work” I asked for the data and never got it.

I don’t work their anymore
True, but knowing how something works enables you to walk the path to learn how to make improvements. It allows you to make reasoned changes vs random changes.
That's a different issue occurring downstream from the contractual arrangement for the songwriting credits.
This never works. People just don't donate. Only developers think donations are a viable form of monetization.
Remote work is terrible for productivity especially if the company was not already remote first. In my employer, we've noticed a 30-40% productivity dip across the board. Not only that, but people are reporting more stress and are working unhealthy hours. Replying to emails at 9pm, etc.

The communication breakdowns are constant. Previously you'd absorb information through osmosis, but the watercooler chat about projects and upcoming initiatives has outright stopped.

If in person meetings are 10 in terms of information bandwidth, video calls are less than 6. They're just terrible. Oh, I accidentally interrupted someone yet again because of lag despite us all having fiber internet. Amazing.
There would almost surely be a censoring effect no matter what age cutoff you pick, and even allowing for typical government incompetence, surely at some level health econometricians are involved in this type of policy and are aware and facilitate whatever trade-offs are being sought.

I love roasting poor government policy decision making as much as the next person, but that would be a bridge too far.
Hrm - maybe this is deserving of some public health lawsuits for any anti-vaxxer videos that slip through their content filter and end up hitting trending.

Youtubers have mentioned that up/down votes seem to have very little effect on video surfacing so I think Youtube has already figured out that folks are heavily biased in up/down voting and removed it from any algorithmic uses.
At least on comments, I'm not sure the dislike button actually did anything previously. The count didn't move when the dislike button was pressed.
If you can describe how what I said fits the informal fallacy of begging the question, I'll concede all disagreements, accept that you're correct in everything and donate AU$500 to a charity of your choice.
Governments print money to keep society from collapsing.

What you rail against is a feature not a bug. So many cryptocoin advocates don’t seem to understand how societies work.

The world can do without BTC just fine. Now more than ever. It doesn’t actually solve a problem we face.

Only those who have Bitcoin seem so adamant about it. No coincidence right? Because we know it needs more ‘suckers’ to buy into the ponzi because no value is ever created.
> What 'love' do you think the US should have given to Japan to stop them attacking?

Oil and military equipment.

> After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and French Indochina in 1940, the United States began to restrict trade with Japan. In 1940, it ceased exporting airplanes, airplane parts, aviation fuel and machine tools to Japan, and in 1941, it stopped the export of oil. This intensified the Japanese need for rubber from Malaya and oil from the Dutch East Indies [0]

[0] https://www.reference.com/history/did-japan-attack-united-st...

I kid though, it was a war situation for the US anyway. They stop supplying Japan, Japan goes to war. They keep supplying Japan, Japan gets stronger and secures more resources until it feels confident in going to war.
White house video: 3.4K dislikes

YouTube Rewind 2018: 19 Million dislikes

I don't see any reason you'd attribute removing dislikes to the former rather than the latter.
I was a bit baffled to hear valuations in the latest batches are reaching $15mm+. For seed. Right of of an accelerator.

If they were able to raise on a cap in that ballpark, the $ amount makes sense.

I have a feeling these high valuations and giant rounds will end up doing a disservice to founders of moderately (but not massively) successful startups who are left with $7mm of notes (or safes) to pay back on acquisition with 1x liquidation preference
You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.
Has anyone else been slowly watching YouTube turn into cable TV? When I search "Hong Kong protests" I just get a bunch of videos from CNN and Fox News, not that long ago a search like that would turn up first hand videos of people who were there. Now they are copying streaming services in making it harder to tell what is garbage and what is worth watching.
Blergh. Thanks. Yeah, I should have done that first this time.
I went about once a week for about 4 months
...and water is wet
For others wondering about this style of entertainment, it's called 'kayfabe'

"Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera."

Outside of the entertainment industry, politics is an obvious example, though wikipedia states:

"It has long been claimed that kayfabe has been used in American politics, especially in election campaigns, Congress, and the White House, but no evidence of actual usage of kayfabe in Washington has ever been uncovered. In interviews as Governor of Minnesota, former wrestler Jesse Ventura often likened Washington to wrestling when he said that politicians "pretend to hate each other in public, then go out to dinner together.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe
> I know that P.1 (Brazil variant) seems to totally avoid natural immunity.

This is completely false, and is a poor extrapolation from a faulty initial data point. There have now been several publications -- including the J&J clinical trial data itself [1] -- which show that immune responses induced by non-variant virus (or vaccine) are protective against the Brazilian variant.

There is some evidence that a particular mutation in the spike protein of the Brazilian variant can partially evade neutralization by particular antibodies, but this is far from "totally avoiding natural immunity".

> The proof is from the city of Manaus, which was over 75% infected in October 2020.

This number is based on a study that was written in summer 2020 [2], and used a number of questionable "adjustments" to the raw seroprevalence data to arrive at their conclusion. Raw seroprevalence data (Figure 2) was closer to 30%, not 75%.

The parsimonious conclusion is that the paper citing 75% seroprevalence in Manaus was wrong. Science really should retract this paper, or publish an addendum. It's an example where low-quality science is leading to a lot of unnecessary panic and speculation.

[1] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420071/how-effective-johns...

[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6526/288
I'm intrigued too, thanks for the paper.

> on a somewhat larger scale, the Lisp user community was not growing much either, and much of what was done in Lisp was now done in newer (an leaner) interpreted languages such as Perl, Python,or Ruby. All in all, the developments did not seem to indicate a healthy state of affairs.

Good news is, Lisp is reawakening and developers shy away from Python :)

> S was rapidly becoming the lingua franca of statistics.

> We were not teaching a marketable skill.

Surprisingly, there are no more reasons. The rest of the paper is dedicated to his love to Lisp and his regrets:

> I very much liked the idea of taking a general purpose programming language, such as Lisp, and adding the statistics on top as a library or a set of plug-ins. There are now various more or less satisfactory attempts to put S/R on top of Java, Perl, and Python but they have the major disadvantage that they involve mapping two competing systems.

> putting the scientific software on top of a general purpose programming language (in the same way as we used to put subroutine libraries such as IMSL on top of FORTRAN and C) is still a good idea, maybe even a better idea than developing special-purpose little languages.

> It is also important not only to standardize on a language, but even on a GUI and a runtime system. That is why it is unfortunate that we still have two major and incompatible imple- mentations of the S language, S-PLUS and R.

etc etc

> The main difference between Lisp-Stat and S/R is that between a set of commands added to a large and popular general purpose programming language and a special-purpose little language for statistical computing. My personal opinion is that it is unfortunate that the statistical community made the choice that it made, because more was given up than was actually gained. [at his time of writing. And now?]
I think the title should be revised to something like “removing public dislike counts”. The tweet shows the dislike feature isn’t removed, dislikes aren’t being deleted, and creators can still see exact dislike counts.