skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kudos to her for landing investors for this idea, but her plan was actually to optimize her pitch for potential investors, and given enough pitches she eventually found a few who pulled the trigger. To me, this is not really a sign of a strong idea for a company, but rather a sign of a good saleswoman. I would expect companies with much better, stronger concepts to land funding much faster.

Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.
> I heavily prioritized male investors. Every time a female investor converted, I asked them to help me find male investors.

Does the above statement seem bigoted?
Totally agree and being messy is a feature and not a bug. And if you’re messy enough you might annoy someone enough that they’ll actually put you on the right path.
The vast majority of English media is published by 2-3 countries, whatever they believe or are incentivized by their governments/capital-class to publish usually become the mainstream narratives.

This centralized system of information dissemination has tremendous flaws.
With the standard that we're working with (the W3C's "Verifiable Credentials" standard [0]) having something that's in JSON or at least "JSON-compatible" is quite important.

[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
The United States is happy to accept all credit for any correlation, no proof of causation necessary.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27299601
unobserved hypothetical variables used to explain a big assumption.
This assumes the only legitimate case of a person directing traffic are people who planned to be in that position (cop, crossing guard, etc.) You need to handle the impromptu cases as well
Absolute gold.

Especially for those of us where top software can be very critical, but who are not in the software business and are committed to efforts in other areas of technology.

I can only imagine the challenges you have been facing are on the increase.
As someone who is currently thinking quite a bit about university admissions (I accepted an offer today, and made a post about it)[1], I think this is sidestepping the main concern: school overcrowding.

Being of a certain minority group, even if I had a perfect prodigal SAT + GPA combo, I would have a 15% chance of getting in. At that point there is no point to taking the SAT, if it's all random chance. [2] Note: I definitely did not have a perfect GPA, or any SAT. Getting rid of the SAT has zero effect on whether I get in.

I still agree with him overall, but until we can get to a point where if you get good grades, you get a spot at a proportionally good university, worrying about the SAT will not matter.

---

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302928

[2]: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/
Last year, claims weren't based on evidence. Even if they turn out to be right, doesn't mean they were "right" at the time.
This article recently posted to HN examines the whole process:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307175

TL;DR lots of conflation of "lab leak" with "man made".
It was a rhetorical question, but since you tried to earnestly answer it I’ll bite.

If you read Matt Levine’s Bloomberg column (I highly recommend it) then you’ll eventually encounter a point he repeatedly makes about institutional investing: the best opportunities are always right at the edge of comfortable. Hidden gems tend to hang out in the same neighborhoods as outright frauds, metaphorically speaking.

I check ZeroHedge daily, not because I “trust” it as a news source, but in accordance with the principle I alluded to above: the really good stuff is probably going to be hidden among outright conspiracy theories and psyops. Most of the crap on ZH is just crossposts from various blogs anyway so it’s pretty easy to filter through it.
> creating separate image files and linking them in its even more cumbersome

I've been working on making this the less-cumbersome approach for my own Jekyll site: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD
>I would honestly rather my business fail than participate in that sort of manipulation. "Unethical" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Ethics become a bit more complex when you are employing people. Would you rather your business fail, so that all the people working for you become unemployed overnight, despite a lot of them having their livelihoods depend on that?

To be clear, I don't think that "i have people working for me, whose livelihoods depend on my business surviving" is a great excuse for all kinds of immoral behavior, but it definitely adds to the nuance. And given what specific scenario we are dealing with here, I don't think it is as clear-cut as you try to make it seem.
> Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.

Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.
Sure, but I still don't know if this answers the question. A year ago, we didn't have hard evidence that the virus had a zoonotic origin either (and we still don't). And yet, news media and social media companies actively suppressed those who even wanted to discuss the very real possibility that the virus came from a lab, branding them as conspiracy theorists and peddlers of misinformation.
> The prestige racket is real but it's not everything, it just wants you to think it is. Hope you can get away from the grueling college app process and let the wind blow those clouds off your sunrise a little. There's gonna come a day when you look over at your work colleague or close personal friend and realize you don't know where they went to school and you don't care enough to ask.

I've just finished, thanks. The more I think about it, the more I feel like you're right. All of this worrying about College applications and "presitgious" universities seems like a ploy to make kids more stressed. Ultimately, I'm simply happy at getting in, so worrying about the 5% edge case where the degree matters is pretty futile.
Let's just admit that nobody looks at it seriously because anyone who even hinted at it would be labeled a racist.

It's labeled as racist because Trump said it first.

Now that trump is gone, we can go back to a normal situation where we discuss any theory without being called racist.
Huh? Voter registration isn’t a problem. Trafficking in voter registration is data is a problem. If a state wants to use voter registration data for voting, fine. If a broker wants to sell voter registration to a client so the client can use it for marketing, surveillance, or most anything else, not fine.
Granted, I'm not a statistician, so maybe I don't trust myself to use statistics blindly, but the first thing I do when I calculate a statistic is to look at a graph to see if the statistic is believable.
How about CosmosDB? Evidently if youre using it you can pay though, so wouldnt mind if that was an enterprise feature.
Yeah. I find intentionally divisive articles like this hard to respect. The author is either trying to game engagement through division or insultingly bucket people into their camps because they really see the world this way. I wish people would stop legitimizing this.

Edited- fixed stuff, finished my thought
What about an "isValid" field returned by your API?

Your problem is that you need the same logic in two places, and you can solve it by centralizing this logic in one place.
That's simply not true. The genetic evidence was there the entire time.
That's true, but it seems like WinForms is basically a dead end at this point, not much maintenance work is put into it and you have to jump through some serious hoops to make basic stuff like DPI scaling work even last I checked. Completely agree though, the 3rd party component story is very good on .NET, but the applications you're producing don't exactly have a modern look and feel unless you're investing serious UI design effort in them on top of things.

WPF (and whatever they've taken to calling the UWP version of it now) is a little more modern, and it's what I was initially leaning towards, but also doesn't seem to be moving much and it feels like the future is very unclear, while even MS themselves have started putting out Electron apps. It really doesn't breed confidence.
Time to fire the admissions staff for not enacting the will of the voters.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on that network more. Is it just about having the same school as someone you're meeting, or is it more about personally knowing that person? Medicine (from what I've heard) is a pretty university-agnostic field, so would the network-effect be more like practice?
Even outside of SPA apps and new magic, Rails is still faster to develop a prototype or website in than React or dare I say any modern SPA tools.

We tested this for fun with some very experienced React and Rails devs at our company, each starting from a freshly formatted laptop to include the time it takes to get an environment up. Requirement was to create a simple blogging site with comments, authors, and tags (with some upfront design). Rails hands-down took the cake, by a large margin, each time.

It was for fun obviously, not exactly scientific, but was pretty eye opening seeing how much further ahead the Rails devs were at each step.
Code Smell 72 – Return Codes
I don't understand the comments on this post. Are we seriously pretending that in 2021 with a nearly universal push for diversity and inclusion, that being a women (or a minority) isn't a massive advantage for raising funds (or getting a job, or getting into college...)?

Are we still conflating lack of proportional representation with discrimination, and completely ignoring the pipeline problem for qualified and/or competent candidates?
The horrors committed by the British Empire are sadly under-reported and not well taught, it has been "Whitewashed". They have not been held accountable nor forced to pay reparations till date.

In particular; the devastation wrought on India beggars belief.

Watch this first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB5ykS-_-CI . Also Read the book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, (aka An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India) by the above speaker.

British Raj siphoned out $45 trillion from India: https://www.livemint.com/Companies/HNZA71LNVNNVXQ1eaIKu6M/Br...

For a description of "Perfidious Albion" read Empire in Asia, How We Came by It: A Book Of Confessions by William McCullagh Torrens.
Forgot to add: I'd prefer to pay for a cheaper plan that offers SSO than to self-host it "for free" and not have SSO.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why would humoring the idea that it came from a lab be "racist"? Did anyone with a real platform and influence ever make that claim? What would make the idea that it came from a Chinese lab more racist than the idea that it was spread because Chinese people have strange and unsafe wet markets where they trade and eat strange and gross (to us Westerners) animals?
Saying there’s no evidence as a rationale to ban discussion of investigating the simplest of explanations was purely political.

I never understood the supposed racism angle either. Why is it racist to suggest a Chinese lab studying corona viruses leaked it out, whether accidentally or deliberately, but it was perfectly fine to say it appeared by itself in an unregulated Chinese wet market?
slack. I do so with my extension[0]. At one point they rewrote it and added CSP.

In order to inject my code before theirs, I had to come up with different approaches on FF and Chrome... and since it was starting to become a cat and mouse game, I just took the extension private.

After that, they didn't escalate their game. I'm thankful for that, so that I can keep enjoying it without spending lots of time figuring out how to mess with it.

[0] https://refined.chat
> I never thought someone would watch it and think, "Holy shit I have to make it" though.

See also: intrusive mass spying using cell phones in the Dark Knight
This is a post mortem for a corpse that was already dead.

Trump derangement syndrome guaranteed this outcome.

Reap what you sow. American mainstream media is pure propaganda, full stop. The national voice is the pr teams of our most valuable corporations. The patient is dead.

When was the last time you thought about what Julian Assange is going through?
What people don't realize is there is an overlap between 'originating from nature" and "originating from a foreign attack", both share a non-lab-leak origin but the latter is not even considered in the countries (US, UK, Japan, etc) with a history of using bio-weapons against citizens/civilians.

Mistaking one for the other is highly probable.
Well you could always crack open a can of anchovies to augment the sauce. It's not as though anchovies are lost to time.
3lue1brown has a great visualization of constructing p-adic numbers and calculating their metric through the lens of 2-adic numbers:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFDM1ip5HdU

This article fills in some bits omitted from the video:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-towering-p-adic-numbe...
Spot on. There are cases for SPAs but there are also a lot of bad cases.

Just the other day there was a news article (don't remember which) here on HN. The entire page "shell" loaded but the content of the article did not.

Quick inspection and it appeared that the SSR page was loading fast but some SPA call that loads the data was underperforming terribly so it was blank.

Let that sink in... we're in the web, it's 2021, everything BUT the article content loaded. Talk about optimizing the wrong thing. We've all went crazy.

The gains are rarely worth the costs.
Nice blog post! I read the whole thing. I'm working on something with multiplayer using an unbounded queue of command events, so I learnt a few things about that situation. If you have any posts that elaborate on the typical infrastructure events from running that in production, I'd love to read it as you obviously put a lot of effort into your blog posts.
Is it possible to compile quicly cli (referenced in the blog post) with musl instead of glibc. I had to add signal.h and it then compiled successfully (using openssl-1.1k) but I got illegal instruction core dumped when executing cli.

https://github.com/h2o/quicly

There are a few Rust alternatives for QUIC. Anyone tried them and have comments.

https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche

https://github.com/quinn-rs/quinn

https://github.com/mozilla/neqo
Even “Holocaust denial” exists on a spectrum.
Fail fast works on the web, where you can redeploy the app with the next page refresh.

It works poorly on mobile, where users are not keen to reinstall an app every few days, and some do not update for months and years, because of lack of space, scarce bandwidth, old hardware, or just neglect.
Unfortunately, having a thoughtful discussion on college admissions is seemingly impossible.

I'm a member of a number of alumni groups of academic institutions and have seen Facebook discussions devolve quite like the author describes. Presenting actual data refuting emotionally held positions gets you labeled and libeled.
Icons at Risk – Iconic Houses
In the Netherlands they use converted shipping containers as student housing. Also stacked fairly randomly and in different colours. Looked really cool.

There was one such complex nearby where I lived. But it didn't turn out well, because of the cheap and fairly indestructible accomodations, the rental agencies filled these up with 'problematic' tenants rather than students and it turned into a slum pretty quickly. The best place in town to get drugs or get stabbed. Eventually it was dismantled obviously. It was a good idea, but stupid management.
This gives me hope that somewhere out there in wild there may be a few Tasmanian tigers still alive and well-hidden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Unconfirmed_sighting...
It is still used in Italian cuisine - colatura di alici.
Pragmatic probably. Might just be easier.

Over decades I’ve Seen lots of sales people target demographics in illegal ways. Mostly insurance and age. Basically impossible to prove unless your put it in writing.

Still one does normally advertise such things.
I thought much of how it went was driven by a seeming confusion between "escaping from a lab" meaning "created or otherwise altered in a lab."
I completely agree. Up until the final paragraph of the article, the point the author seemed to be making is "rich people will do better in college so only rich people should go to college."
I do find it interesting that the idea of a foreign country dropping covid in China is not even considered.

It's not even considered by the people who are aware of the history of mass anti-Sino biological warfare that took place around WW2 and the decades after.
>Which is a big problem.

Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?
not really, if your goal is to have a therapeutic research base you can reorient to humans.

we’ve cured MS and sepsis in rats like 20 times now. Doesn’t mean much for us.
> So what actually changed? How did it go from a conspiracy theory to something that’s plausible and open to discussion?

The answer is obvious. Do you really need an answer?

Ditto with Facebook suddenly changing face...
Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals.

That said, there are published RCT showing Ivermectin effectiveness.

In my second link on my first comment, there's a talk about the overwhelming data, censorship and hindrances for publishing.

Sharing evidence on Ivermectin - Dr. Tess Lawrie

https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=5756
A fantastic article from the last time this topic came up: https://failedarchitecture.com/2014/06/a-year-in-the-metabol... It goes over the history of the tower, the experience of the author living there, and has better shots of the interiors featuring a variety of tenants.
So this is the fault of the people who were probably right. And it is not the fault of the people who told them to be quiet and that they believed in conspiracy theories.
The problem is that the first thing might be callable, and it might expect one or more arguments that could include functions. If your intention was to add something to the result of a function, but + was passed as input to that function, you wouldn't get what you expected.
> I heavily prioritized female investors. Every time a (male) investor converted, I asked them to help me find female investors.

This is the text I'm seeing on my chrome /mobile android browser, would be funny if we were being shown different versions, but it seems as if you might have made a mistake there.
It's a pretty common flow. Many people are "impressed" or "blown away" or "love the team" etc etc.

The responses are all platitudes and I've learned to ignore things that are "positive feedback".

Today, the only thing that says an investor is in when they sign and send the money. Up until money in the bank, it doesn't matter how nice or how tough a potential investor is.

Unless you're the hottest startup, this is probably the most realistic way to treat all meetings and understand that it really is a grind.
I've been there, done (Something like) that and I'd rather duplicate code than doing this ever again.
Upvoted because it's a good summary, but could you offer a source for your claim that "most of this timber came from public lands"? This is surprising to me, and I'm wondering if this is a local phenomenon rather than a national claim. The very quick searching I did (https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R45688.html) suggests that the harvest from NFS lands peaked at about 15% in the 1980's, and has been lower since.
Colloquially though, compilation typically implies moving toward a more low level(less abstract) representation.
Communism invented space travel, the mobile phone, and the artifical heart.
Indeed. There are a lot of myths of Greek/Roman gods that are similar to ones about Hindu gods that may be due to a shared Indo/European ancestral culture.
Last year, it was officials under the Trump administration and Republican legislators pushing this idea.

This year, it's former Trump administration officials leaking intel to the Wall Street Journal anonymously and it caught fire.
Thanks. The first and last option seem to be the same, no?
Nothing really changed, it's just that the evidence keeps mounting on one side and hard to explain facts keep coming up for the other. There's a coherent theory of how and why this could be a lab leak (published research leaving a trail in this direction, BSL-2 safety precautions, etc.) and a lot of holes in the fully zoonotic explanations.

The virus appears to have already been adapted to human hosts, which is hard to explain... unless via humanized mice. The intermediate animal reservoirs have not been located, so there's a decent sized evolutionary jump in the record, the furin cleavage site with the strange codons, etc.

Meanwhile objections from the other side, like the lack of markers from CRISPR, can be explained by seamless techniques, gain of function research in humanized mice, etc.

Mind you, I never bought the 'bioweapon' conspiracy nonsense, there's just no realistic motive for that. But it was pointed out early on that there were good reasons to study a virus just like this one and scientists have been putting the pieces together into a coherent theory that points towards lab escape.
Here's a youtube playlist of some random videos made with search terms like fortnite, roblox, godzilla etc -https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC1K_ZG1k61h2diUlgX_m...
If you say "missing matter", the thing most physicists think of first is probably missing anti-matter, and then missing baryons. Not dark matter.

It's a bit late to suggest new nomenclature for something that's been around for many decades.
> Sure: traditional non-SPA websites are not immune to this pitfall. Someone might load your website, have a form open for many weeks, and then submit it after their session expired or the API changed. But that’s a much more limited exposure to failure than in the SPA case.

I don't really understand why this is a much more limited exposure to failure and he doesn't really elaborate why this is the case. It seems like the cause for failure in both cases are identical and the only reason that the SPA one would be a more likely scenario is simply due to the prevalence of SPAs, rather than any technical reason.

Overall I broadly agree with the article; that React is often wasted on webpages that simply don't need it. That a lot of technology that is plenty serviceable today is overlooked because it's not 'cool.' I actually think php is great (even though writing it isn't very fun to me) and it was one of my first introductions in creating dynamic webpages when I was a kid outside of some cgi scripts like NewsPro.

Vanilla javascript today is very robust but it's not exactly someone will end up writing a lot of unless they're going out of their way to do so. Web components might very well fit the needs someone might have for their website... but that doesn't really matter if you already know how to use components in React and you have to learn web components. There's a lot of momentum towards the known, especially when that known technology is valuable to employers.

Ultimately I think that while it's generally excessive, people gravitate towards what they're comfortable with and what makes their development life easier. Sure, this website may not require a React app, but it's something that I'm very familiar with and it's easy for me to create a website with it. It's easy for me to create interactive and dynamic elements in a system that is designed for that purpose. And the reward for having this knowledge is market value. This will always be a problem, regardless of what web technology is popular at any given moment.