skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting for India
Hi HN, we’re Aditya and Sri Teja, founders of Swipe (https://getswipe.in). We make it easy for local businesses in India to invoice their customers over WhatsApp. Instead of giving a paper invoice to their customer, Swipe users send a WhatsApp message with a link that allows them to pay instantly with a variety of payment methods.

We were building software and IoT for industrial automation before we started working on this. We dealt with a lot of invoices, purchase orders and estimates for different customers/vendors on a daily basis. We used to manually make invoices on spreadsheets and store them locally on our computers. Initially, it was working fine but as we got more sales it started to get difficult to manage. On top of that, we had to file monthly tax returns where we would manually consolidate our sales on spreadsheets and send them to our accountant for filing. The whole process is tedious and the existing software available to do it is riddled with accounting jargon and primarily targeted towards professional accountants.

We quickly realized that these efforts were not helping the company and that the time and energy would be better spent on talking to our customers and focusing on our product. Interestingly, we also found out that most of the ~75M SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in India still rely on manual processes in tracking sales, purchasing inventory, cash management, tax filings, and payments—all highly inaccurate and inefficient and a huge opportunity for us to make an impact.

We launched with a simple MVP, with just the Sales module in January and recruited our first few customers. With continuous feedback from our initial customers, we quickly iterated and improved our MVP and started adding Purchases, Estimates, Expenses and Inventory modules. Now we have over 1000 businesses onboarded with us and growing.

Using Swipe, business owners can now create invoices, purchase orders and quotations in a few seconds without any accounting knowledge. Based on their sales, purchases and expenses, we automatically update inventory, payables and receivables and make it easy for them to manage accounting. We also instantly generate those awful monthly tax filings!

Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your thoughts, experiences and the time you spend on accounting and tax filing. We are live on https://getswipe.in. Please share your feedback with us.
The quality of my writing goes up when I'm actively reading quality literature. Lately I've just reading internet junk so my prose sucks.
A decent next step would be to send more than one police officer, but it probably isn't really worth it.
I meant more like wheel(?) shop to shop, do the shopping on foot so it charges while wheeling.

Is wheeling the verb for it anyway?
it's a question of scale. in a small town of 120, yes, absolutely. In a city of a million, it's hard to get everyone to hold the line. A few fall, which causes more to lose their nerve, and more fall, and authority is enforced.

but a group of say 500? that know each other on sight? Sure.

I grew up in a small town in the US southwest. There's a reason Texas has successful defenses for murder that were "he needed killing". It can be terrifying to be on the wrong side of a popularity contest.
Choose a better tech stack IMO. One that facilitates the pits of success rather than pits of failure.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
> but who's going to be a snitch for the benefit of the outsider?

I would, but I also have something of an antagonistic streak and a finely tuned sense of justice. I imagine there are many people out there, even in a small community of 120, who would have no problem sticking it to the establishment out of spite. It doesn’t take a big community to sow a faction of dissidents.
I'm not saying that it was right - I'm saying that's what would be expected. Foreigners buying holiday homes have long been hated by small communities - particularly in Ireland and Wales and targets for arson. They can make property too expensive for locals and reduce demand for local businesses. A holiday home would be maintained but leaving a coastal property empty for 8 years it would likely it would also be an eyesore - this wasn't some farmhouse in the middle of nowhere it was 'downtown'.
I like the idea that employers are now going to have to actually think hard about how to make the office an attractive place to work. I hope some really positive improvements come out of it.
Thanks for posting that example. It helped clarify why I dislike that style so much.

Please don't take offense! What works for me doesn't have to be what works for you, OK? :-)

But the insight - if I dare call it that - is that one style leads me to read across each line, where the other style leads me to read down the columns.

In your example, my eyes see an x, a y, a width, a height, a backgroundColor, a color, and so on. And then I see a 3, a 2, a 0, another 0, a 'white', a 'black', etc.

As you can tell, I am reading down the first column, and then reading down the second column. And by then I'm losing track of which thing goes with which.

It's not that I mean to do that, it's just how my eyes are drawn when I see something arranged in columns.

If we reformat this without the column alignment, it looks like this:

const style = {
x: 3,
y: 2,
width: 0,
height: 0,
backgroundColor: 'white',
color: 'black',
fontWeight: 'normal',
shadowStyle: 'none',
borderStyle: 'round'
paddingX: 2,
paddingY: 1,
}

It's definitely not as nice looking this way! But now I read it completely differently:

We have an x of 3, a y of 2, a width of 0, a height of 0, a backgroundColor of 'white', a color of 'black', etc.

This style leads me to read across each line instead of down each column. I think that may be why it is easier for me to understand.

And to repeat myself, I am truly grateful to you for posting this example. It helped me get some understanding of what goes on in my eyes and brain.
I have spent a couple of great weekends on Tory. One special night with the late King of Tory, Patsy Dan, and the local Priest in the hotel bar will live long in the memory. Patsy had his squeeze box and there was plenty of 'craic agus ceol'.

But people on those small islands are a different type altogether.
It's "explained" to the reader of the comics. The title had me expect it was "explained scientifically", in other words "solved by the scientists".
Are conferences good value for money (as a use for free software donations/funding)? Like I get that they're good, I like attending conferences. But if I could choose between employing someone full-time for a month (especially somewhere with low cost of living like India or Eastern Europe) and buying flights and a hotel room for a weekend, I think I'd choose the former.
What amazes me is these Slack-like chats cannot ever look outside the box. How about... A tabbed interface? So that I can easily switch between rooms and threads, and not cram them all into a single screen?
> Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter.

These positions are part of the incentive system: "if you're loyal and work hard, you might one day get a job like that." For most people, being able to lord over others is very seductive and motivating.

The managers just want to continue to experience what they construe as their "reward" for loyal careers.
Actually installing Windows 95 on every machine was never really necessary. You could just install it once, configure it and clone the hard drive. Even actual cloning was not necessary - you could just copy the hard drive contents with a reasonable file manager like Total Commander (which was called Windows Commander those days).
There's beauty and craft in these things too!
Project MARCH – open-source exoskeleton technology
Hey HN,

I wanted to share this project I have been working on for the last year, Project MARCH! Project MARCH is a student team of the TU Delft that is involved in the development of a user-friendly and versatile exoskeleton, a motorized robotic suit, that can be used to get people with a spinal cord injury to stand up and walk again. Our team consists of 26 full-time volunteers that have spent the last year to design, program, and test a powered exoskeleton for our pilot.

After a few months of legal paperwork, we were finally able to make the software available under the GPLv3 open source license. We are investigating options to make the hardware open source as well! One of our goals is to investigate the possibilities of exoskeleton technology. Open sourcing our hard- and software allows others to learn from it and possiblity build their own exoskeleton, without having to spend years doing research.

You can watch a video of the previous iteration of our exoskeleton at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YilqnUZQIks&t=2010s
This years iteration will be revealed on August 22nd!
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at tech (at) projectmarch.nl
Would doubling the cost, or more, actually provide double the benefits? At the end of the day it's the police officer who has the duty to protect and serve.
That's becoming harder to see, it seems.

Liberal, democratic governments are supposed to maintain our various social contracts by dint of a granted monopoly on the use of violence or force. Laws and justice systems are there as tools for governments to exercise justified and escalating force to elicit compliance with social contracts, e.g. social order.

When enforcement fails, the social contract is broken, and an individual may find that they are left with no better course of action than to exercise the force that was inappropriately withheld.

This guy could be justified in disappearing those who disappeared his house, if left with no better recourse and his property remains under threat. Basic tit for tat game theory overrides morality when social order breaks down.
Shift-M/47: Bjarne Stroustrup on the future of programming
I think the problem is someone in Prague can say "Public transport in Europe is cheap, frequent and reliable" when talking about their experience and be totally correct ... while someone in some British cities can say "Public transport in Europe is actually expensive and quite unreliable" and also be correct from their experience. I think that at least in central Europe if you randomly select a city with >100k people you're likely to find that there's a good bus/trolley/tram network that can take you to your work - I don't know about Mediterranean countries, the Balkans or Scandanavia.
Hey I really feel for you. Please don’t disengage, fight hard to get mentored.

Not sure what your org is like but ask to pair remotely if you can, ask to do code reviews over video call so you can talk through questions, ask your manager regularly to talk you through the trade offs involved in the decisions they are making, etc. If you hear about a weekly status call happening on some project, ask if you can be included “to learn.”

Your goal is to first increase your situational awareness and understanding of the domain, because that is upstream of the technical trade offs.

I think people graduating into this have to fight really hard for the mentorship and learning that would happen naturally 10 years ago.

People like me who graduated 10-15 years ago and would now naturally be your mentors don’t realise this because we never faced it.
> These were his childhood friends

No, he was an outsider who moved to the island.

As with a lot of comments on crime, there is a difference between "explaining" and "exculpating". I agree that "explaining" usually makes it look like the victim's fault.
Having the CD dump on the hard drive was a must in the Windows 9x days because every time you would want to add a device, a network protocol or whatever it would ask you to insert the CD. I rarely ever installed from the actual CD directly but always copied it to the hard drive first. Obviously there there were exceptions because some computers just had too little of HDD space so you had to save it for your user files and the apps to be installed (this also is the case with 120 GB MacBooks nowadays - I can't afford a Windows VM on it).
> no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home)

I think there's just no food at all at the office. Most offices work that way, at least where I live (France).
Ask HN: Looking for a ~100Gb public dataset for cassandra. Any links?
Google Maps prevents searches for “corona test”
The German Government Just Released a Developer Platform for Federal APIs
>Do you have any small examples of when you'd want to discard error messages?

My point is more that error messages risk being discarded wherever there are nested validations (when talking about Haskell).

Consider the following crude example:

validate = do
x <- foo -- `x` is the result of some validation
bar x -- and here, it is fed into a dependent validation
where
bar y = do
z <- baz -- `baz` is a validation, but independent of the argument
foobaz y z -- `foobaz` is a validation dependent on the argument
return ()

No part of `bar` will run if `foo` fails to validate and yield the data required to run `bar`. But running the `bar` validation involves a sub-validation `baz` that is independent of the argument passed to `bar` - so in reality, it should be possible to always run `baz` and capture any error messages from it.

But the way the code is structured means that the `baz` errors are silently dropped some of the time, even when they could be captured. It's up to the programmer to decide if the extra complexity of floating `baz` to the top-level is worthwhile - and the programmer has to keep these kinds of decisions in mind constantly while writing the validation code.

Reordering validations is also a possibility, and it might be available in a graph-based rules engine. But you have to take care to not introduce side-effects into any part of the validation process, otherwise you would get surprising behaviour whenever there was a re-ordering. When writing Haskell code, re-ordering is not really an option for that reason.
1. An office with four walls, a door that can be closed is helpful but as a _minimum_ I'd also want:

2. Pristine bathrooms

3. Clean kitchen and good supply of tea/coffee (with ample space for those to store or prepare their food hygenically).

The amount of places I've worked that can't provide 2 and 3 is saddening. Nothing worse than being stuck in a dirty smelly place, hanging around to get points for presenteeism.

No I'm gonna get on a rant.

Why is it that my home network is superior to the crappy wifi at the office?

Why with my limited salary can I setup a better desk with much better screens / computing equipment than my employer provides?
Because sponsors, media, enterpreneurs, and the public, are increasingly crass and low class.

Too much so to appreciate and sponsor classic sportsmanship tied to a tradition of millenia, and not e.g. basket/football/tennis and the like, if not the latest cheap pop star.
Show HN: Test monitoring for CI Pipelines, free for open-source projects
> Companies should let employees decide where to work from.

That's why a WeWork office exists.
Isn't a better approach to pick types of meetings that don't have these outcast properties?
I give a little prayer to people like you when I add a few more numbers to my “matrix” field in GitHub actions and spin up 4 more machines in parallel.
My wish-list for the next YAML
Don't they? For 99% of what people do, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and LibreOffice equivalents will do just fine. Heck, Google Docs will do just fine.
I think this would work the opposite way because people would think it's a great conversation starter.
Has this effectively banned gaming PCs from California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont and Washington?
> Neville Presho is scanning the horizon for the house that he hasn’t seen in eight years. /.../ But there’s a problem. The house isn’t there. It has completely vanished.

Interesting story, but doesn't look like it evaporated into thin air if you look at the photo.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p09n3zd7.jpg

Either I'm missing something, or the intro is very badly (and sensationally - silly season!) written, possibly by someone who didn't listen to the actual program.
Just by the way, the EduExo folks have a kickstarter that closes in 25 hours and is $1000 short of their funding goal:

"EduExo Pro: A Robotic Exoskeleton Kit for STEM Education
The EduExo Pro is an Arduino-powered educational robotics kit that enables you to build your own wearable robotic exoskeleton."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/auxivo/eduexo-pro-a-rob...

They had a previous kickstarter that did quite well:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1485976654/eduexo-the-f...
I agree but unfortunately that would require rebuilding a large number of the world's cities, which is not very likely in the near future.
I thought it was really vanished but instead it is visibly destroyed.
I can't imagine trying to code without being able to align characters on different rows...
Conferences are essential in building a healthy community - and seeing who you actually "work for", especially as an open source developer. Sure, you can sit on Zoom for an hour or two and hold a talk, but you really can't beat the face-to-face experience.

I think it's something you need to experience to see the value in.
It sucks to read this because I feel targeted. I can not get any coding done at home and am 10x more productive if I have people around me working on the same project. I need to see the face of another person or I just go limp and become unmotivated.

People work differently and I think that an employer should accommodate as many types of work environments as possible. There should be a choice between remote or in-office and neither choice should be seen as better or worse.
A distributed “persistence-first” shared log
>>Or they hope to have a garage someday but don’t today.

Well, I'd love to believe this, but the matter of fact is that the tax structure around hybrids is completely messed up here in UK.

When I got my Volvo, basically as a company car you could either get the highest non-hybrid model, the T6, with about 300bhp and pay like 30% tax on it every year, or get the T8 hybrid, with 400bhp, and pay zero tax on it every year. And of course the government never checks whether you actually ever plug your hybrid in or not, so if you never do it's actually much worse for economy and emissions than the T6 which is much more to tax. It's insanity.
I have to think that at least with modern phone OSes, apps are so compartmentalized, that there really isn’t an opportunity to pollute your entire phone.

But feel free to look at all the extensions and bullshit you have in your browsers and bash shell
I'm bit puzzled what sound a monitor makes?
I think the issue with

goals - energy used

is that it requires tuning to make sure that completing goals is better than just idling. A variant that might work better is to optimize "mileage".

goals / (energy used + epsilon)

Where epsilon has two purposes: it prevents division by zero, and ensures that more goals is (marginally) better than less
That's a huge red flag for me though. If you're employed (so not working as a freelancer for the company), the employer is supposed to provide the equipment you can work on. For them to expect usage of personal devices and then have a requirement of installing these kind of tools on it wouldn't be expectable to me.
The Many Faces of Loki
It's solar powered so it potentially could continue for a while, until its solar panels get too dusty.

It doesn't have any instruments to look for signs of life (or really, anything else), so its mostly limited to scouting.
Comparing Open Source BGP Stacks
I agree. Especially the Jewish arabs. No interest whatsoever in getting along with muslims.

Oh wait that’s not what you mean? By Arab you meant Muslim, be honest.

And if you think Israelis have always tried to get along swimmingly with all other people,go read about Moses commiting genocide in Medina, slaughtering everything but thw virgins who were enslaved and gifted as spoils of war.

Yes, biblical references are relevant since israelis use their silly mythologies to justify their thefts in other countries and their genocide in palesatine.
Show me an example where you need to do that, and maybe I can suggest an alternative.

Or I will say "yup, you got me there!" ;-)
I feel like, in your third sentence, you may have typed "enjoying" and intended "employing".
Seems pretty clear cut to me.

Outsider buys property on tiny island community, then disappears for 8 years. Islander gets annoyed about the vacant property blocking their view so decides to remove it. Other islanders refuse to rat them out due to being a tight community

End of mystery
This is what we wound up doing with Pitcairn.
can you try transitioning with your current employer?
So all I need to do is find a generation of 8mm exabyte enabled camera with fireworks, and play maybe. Thanks
I switched to Iosevka Term Regular, which is a condensed font so it gives me more characters in the horizontal direction. It took me a week of getting used to it, but now I'm not looking back. It's free.

https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
It's not as good as it's sounds, especially with new Ryzen cores.

IBM won't let you do benchmark comparisons, but I've found unofficial ones that show Ryzen is almost 3X performance per thread on general purpose workloads.

You can get a 32 core 64 thread Ryzen for $2000. And it should have around 2/3 the performance of a top of the line z15 mainframe that costs $200,000+ . And the Ryzen is a single chip, so the rest of the hardware is cheap and compact.
Show HN: CI Observability for test troubleshooting,free for open-source projects
> Collaborating with others works as well for me over a video call as it does in person.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Depending on your office culture, processes, personalities of the people involved, and any number of other things… it can be _good enough_. But you are always going to make compromises to communication and collaboration by all working in completely different locations.

I think this is one of the reasons everybody gets so frustrated by the WFH discussion. Sure there’s lots of reasons why the WFH experience can be better for the worker, but most of the discussion on the topic is so completely dishonest. The detractors will grossly exaggerate the downsides, and then comments like this refuse to even acknowledge that compromises are being made.
FreeDOS Running Windows 3.1
The western industrialization didn’t create gulags in the western world, but it was largely paid for by untold cruelty in Asia and Africa, and slavery in the US. Concentration camps existed far before the Nazis, and many millions died through genocide and famine created by the European powers.
Actually I have very fond memories of my office prior to 2010 or so. I had either a private office or shared it with another colleague, and both options were great as these were both professionals and amiable types.

However, once the open space revolution started and we had to flock like animals, it became a nightmare. People started to have headaches, problems with ears and even vagus nerve from constant headphone use. Some of my colleagues complained their blood pressure levels are higher than ever, with no apparent reason. Production-wise, it was a disaster.

The pandemic clearly demonstrated how useless open space offices were and how much more productive we can be if not treated like cattle. For me it does not matter that much if I work in a private office or at home, but spending most of my day in an open space is unacceptable, especially now that we finally have other options.
Yep that was my thought too. This one (open data commons license) seems to end at 2019 https://datahub.io/sports-data/english-premier-league and that originated from a gambling site that has later data and lots of leagues... Not sure it will include plays, assists etc. Would work wonders for fantasy football errmmm I mean soccer. There must be something around 20:20 cricket surely :)