skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depending on the niche, this can be true. But it's also generally true that low CaC equals low per-unit pricing and margins. Very difficult to run a business at a consumer-friendly price point without getting to really substantial scale.

For example, Netflix has all the benefits of scale, low cost of capital, etc. and their profit margin is 11% on a service that starts at $9/mo. So if your service has similar pricing power to Netflix, you might need order of 10,000 individual customers to cover a single engineer. And that's after the frequently massive investment required up front to build a product to B2C standards.

In B2B, it's often easier to find some niche that a) is underserved or not served at all, b) is relatively valuable to some set of customers, and c) can be served with a lower quality of finish because it's a business app.

In the B2B space, it's much easier to charge $49/mo, $99/mo, or higher because businesses tend not to be price sensitive in that range. Also, businesses often will need SSO or other "Enterprise" feature and so then you have a $10k+ annual contract for the same service. In this band of self-service B2B SaaS, there is typically not much of a "sales" process. Just post the info on the site and let prospects choose. You can do demos when it makes sense. But nothing like a 1-year intensive sales process. The sales process is closer to B2C, but for more money and less churn.

It's much easier to build a business when you only need to make 50 or 100 sales (and support 50 or 100 customers) to get to profitability.

Honestly, having bootstrapped & sold a SaaS myself, I would not consider bootstrapping anything with a starting price point of less than about $49/mo. And I would only go that low if customers were encouraged to land on a plan at $99/mo or higher.
Rails mostly.
"Better" depends on your requirements of course, but Freenet predates the blockchain and its underlying encrypted distributed data store could serve as the basis for a distributed ledger.

https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki
> restrictive housing

I visited San Francisco thirty years ago and surveyed somewhat the effects of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Collapsed freeways and so forth were still visible. I think of this as I hear the Milennium tower is sinking into the sand - and San Francisco has not been hit by an earthquake for a while. I don't know what the future of building upward in the city will be.

Why not fix up Caltrain? Why not have BART be fixed up and something people find safe and convenient instead of curse?

Decent public transportation is not completely absent in the US. Decent public transport from the East Bay would fix a lot of problems.

I don't think "remove regulation on business" is some stroke of genius, it sounds fairly lazy. Real estate developers are not some oppressed group, they tend to run local politics in most of the country.
Phoenix + Liveview + TailwindCSS + Postgres

Unless a static site or buy option fits right, otherwise it doesn't get any better than a Liveview based app for continued productivity.
Again, the government shouldn't have to spoon feed everything. They've said repeatedly that people without underlying conditions are at less risk. They shouldn't have to put out a PSA on the food pyramid and recommended daily intake of various nutrients: literally anyone with more than a grade school education is aware of these things.

Should they also be saying avoid second hand smoke to minimize respiratory problems if you get COVID? Should tell diabetics to keep their blood sugar between 70 and 120, and their A1C below 7, to avoid additional complications if they get COVID? Should they be plastering PSAs all over the news media to tell the millions of obsese people to lose weight due to COVID?

No, of course not. Some things, like following established nutritional guidelines, are just obvious and it would be an overbearing nanny state to expect the government to be condescending enough to do this sort of thing.
“no responsive design (remember designing 3 different sites to deal with the 460x640, 600x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions?”

Using media queries with breakpoints, and doing exactly what you describe, was the original “responsive design”. What you have in mind (I think) is what might be called “fluid design”—responsive design without media queries. You could always do this to some extent with such things as inline blocks, auto margins, and other ancient CSS technology (and an unstyled site also reflows responsively), but flex and grid allow more elaborate fluid designs.

There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.
Same diff, the entire thing is an implementation detail of cpython and deeply tied to that VM.
The most Fun you get is rebuilding the wheel. That is where you hit the sweet spot with a language.

People say that the "fashion" in chose stack is about shinny new things, but I think, instead, is the joy of have a chance of rebuild the wheel, better (hopefully!), this time.

That is what I see when Ruby/Django hit the market, and now with Rust.
Good piece. I'd tend to argue more for mild vetocracies/Madisonian political systems with multiple checks & balances when we're constructing actual governments. Many people heavily involved in politics ("intense policy demanders", I've heard them called) are just moderately insane overall, so I'm pretty interested in blocking bad ideas and rapid change. I'm kind of small c conservative that way. (I agree the US Senate should have a supermajority voting requirement, etc.)

One thing that makes some vetocracies illegitimate, however, is that a small group of people wield far outsized power relative to their numbers. This is the objection to say a tiny group of wealthy, usually elderly people who can block new housing construction based on complaints about 'neighborhood character'. I'm fine with actual gridlock some issues where the US is genuinely divided, but I object to a tiny tiny minority with outsized power. Contrary to popular belief, James Madison was actually against too much minority power and had a few rants in the Federalist Papers about how democratic systems should be majority rule-only
Are there any good detective games based around interrogating a suspect where you're given a decent amount of freedom in what you can say/ask over fixed dialogue trees?

Her Story can be viewed as something like this in a limited form, where there's a satisfying enough reason for the limitations.

Return of the Obra Dinn was awesome. Like Her Story, the deduction goes on in your own head or on paper in contrast to e.g. an unnatural UI that shows a nodes/lines diagram of facts where you're joining facts together to prove you know what's going on.
Religious fanatics have used this argument for the past few million things that have since been explained by science. Will likely do so for the next who knows how many years until everything is explained.
Your example is, IMO, the exact use of this service. If you're a chemistry expert, you're probably not a coding one. These reviewers will ensure your code is testable and likely to do what you hope it does, in a way where your fellow experts can read and write their own automated proofs (tests).
Go with:

* sqlc to connect to PostgreSQL Aurora.

* zerolog for logging.

* chi for router.

* jQuery for JS interactivity.

Those are where my strength lies. I can add or reduce components at a lightning speed using Go.
Interesting, thanks for the pointer! I was aware of Gopher, but not Gemini. It seems to address what would be one of my main concerns about any proposed alternative, which is - for the beginning at least - interoperability with the web.

I'm sure people have other bold ideas. I personally think there's a lot of room for something which builds on the 'progressive web app' paradigm: i.e. a web for websites which are more like apps, downloaded once and then exchanging data ad hoc with a backend server, with potentially much richer and more performant experiences. WebAssembly (WASM + WASI) would be a great foundation for something like that. But that's just one among countless compossible paths.
I have a rotary phone hooked up to a VOIP box that doesn't support pulse dialing.

There's a guy in Australia who makes little in-line adapters that translate the pulses into touch tones. It's about the size of a U.S. wall jack, line-powered, and works very well.

I've had it for something like ten years, so I'm afraid I don't have any contact information. But if he's making them, someone else might be doing the same.
Huh? Pickles don't go bad. That's kinda the whole point of pickling.
gotta update the marketing
I think that attitude is a little short-sighted, and perhaps a little bit of "anyone that isn't a pure developer is incompetent" elitism.

For one thing, titles are just titles, and they stick around for historic reasons. For example, there really isn't a great reason for companies to call people DevOps Engineer, but it still happens.

I'll take the Solutions Architect role as an example. It's basically sales or customer-oriented developer or technical resource that works with customers to determine what a solution to a problem will look like. "Architect" is mostly meaningless in the sense that Solutions Architects don't really architect much of anything. Usually, they just come up with a plausible path forward and visualize that solution to all the stakeholders involved. This includes travel to customer sites, something that developers are basically never willing or expected to do.

They're the folks who deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. They have people skills, they're good at dealing with people. Yeah, I mean, considering the staff engineer on my team does not shower, there is value in that role.

Most of the value in the Solutions Architect is how they're able to work with customers to discover their needs on a more technical level rather than at a high level. Once the plan is determined, the solutions architects don't actually build the solution on their own, they're more like an interface or leader to the development team that builds the solution.

https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/solution-architect/

I don't want to put words into your mouth, but maybe you're skeptical of "architects" because they aren't typically expert specialists in one small area. Maybe that's why you don't want to be associate with them. Understandable, perhaps, but don't be misguided into thinking that "architects" aren't skilled professionals who add value to the company.

On top of that, I believe they're often paid higher than developers ;-)
That was sort of the purpose of making his lot so large in the hypothetical.

But let's change it. Let's say Bob is running a rather large nuclear reactor. Initially this is fine - nobody is around him and nuclear power is very environmentally friendly. However, time goes on, and after a few years Bob and his large homemade nuclear reactor are surrounded by hundreds of brand new but very full preschools all bordering his property.

Do we have a right to ask Bob to stop running his nuclear reactor? Situations change, risk models change. What was originally fine is now a hazard to other people.
I don't think what we're running into here is "human nature" so much as it is investor nature. I'm not particularly familiar with them, but Polkadot has raised $300M. There has to be some return for that investment (i.e. they need to be able to lock users into their ecosystem and prove to investors that a competitor can't come along and provide an equally valuable service without starting from scratch). How can a truly decentralized service / protocol compete with the companies that are getting that kind of investment?
I wasn’t aware on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty it said “Give me your wealthy, fur-clad masses yearning to make a buck”
Yeah, but neverssl.com could expire and start serving porn (or whatever), but we can be pretty sure example.com won't.
I am possibly alone in thinking the biggest thing to happen in computing in the 80s/90s was the spreadsheet. Having an immeasurable affect on the productivity of organizations large and small, to this day. So what does the 21st century version of the spreadsheet look like?
US Prosecutors Went After Professors Working with China. Now Cases Are Faltering
To me it's just sort of a given that Ruby is pleasant to work with. Otherwise Rails wouldn't be. If Rails itself were unpleasant, though, merely being in Ruby wouldn't be enough to make up for that.
I would also recommend just going for something boring and fast (for you the developer).

It's a poc, the only thing that matters is getting it out the door. In fact code might not even be necessary for a poc.

If this were me, I would dig up my last abandoned monolith with all the boring details like routing, migrations, seeding, auth all figured out, rip out the old code and start from there.
I wouldn't describe Tesla as a corporation that is risk averse.
> Firstly child welfare services aren’t there to give another few years of average lifespan to poorer kids. They’re there to protect children from neglect or danger.

Huh? What do you think is the result of protection from neglect and danger? It's like you're saying, doctors aren't there to extend lifespan either, just to protect from danger.
Peer to peer systems are not necessarily decentralized. They are decentralized if their traffic does not require access by a third party. Its the difference between Napster and BitTorrent.

In the case of your scenario it could be considered decentralized as you are using cloud storage as merely a storage point, as in a dedicated redundancy, but I am hesitant to consider a dedicate server as a point of decentralization regardless of its intention or access limitations.
I'm failing as a regular dev, and I'm too burnt out to care.
Apparently this is the decoded message:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME - THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW - WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME - I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE - SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH - I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH.
Evolution is a name humanity has given a process. It makes no sense to ask "who created evolution".
I say: do it!

I am also a freelance consultant but in the cloud infra space. I appreciate the freedom it gives me and the insight on the operations of running a business are invaluable.

As a software engineering I always looked suspiciously at accounting and finance, but I have to admit I've been wrong. I discovered a practical and theoretical elegance that is very pleasing for someone like me.

I ended up enrolling in an MBA because I wanted to learn more about the business side of things. I had a few courses about corporate finance, valuation and accounting which filled many gaps I had.

I still don't trust myself running my own finances completely, so I do pay an accountant to take care of the details. But I am very happy I know financially what is what when deciding where to take my little business.

Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to finance.
Some of the best surgeons, the ones with the best patient outcomes, are high functioning sociopaths.

But that is orthogonal to my point, a lot of doctors, lawyers, etc. are not any more arrogant than the average person; they just get labelled that way because people don't like being told they are wrong or getting bad news.
Isn't it an inevitable process considering how life works on this planet? I suppose you could say that life creates it, in the same way that you could say drivers create traffic patterns.
I know some communities use the kernel code as reference a lot
I feel like I've been reading this story for well over a decade at this point. On one hand this is great news and I would think almost inevitable with enough time, but as layperson on this subject plastic eating microbes still fall into the category as nuclear fusion and anti-ageing medicine -- something just around the corner, but always a decade or so away.

Is this actually an entirely new discovery in the sense that this was an unexpected find, or is this just another find of many showing the same trend? And what kind of time frames should I be expecting before plastics are considered biodegradable like other natural materials?

I have to admit, the idea that plastic could become biodegradable in a few decades changes my perception of their use a little and I'm not sure this is a positive thing, especially if this is something that isn't likely to happen for a very long time.
Well, the trend seems to be completely on the other way, on making the experience as slow as possible.
Contact customer support about the deleting the profile, these things usually are taken very seriously, especially if it still is happening. If you don't hear anything back, call CS back and complain, shit will hit the fan then. I used to work in Alexa, and if we ignored a CS complaint like this, it would get escalated quickly and highly. Some of your assumptions about the back end are wrong too. As much as you hear bad news on how Amazon treats their employees, they really do care a lot about their customers.
So... Are you trying to argue that it's easier today to make an acceptable company website than it was in the 90ies... or that it was easier in the 90ies than it is now?
I'm a layperson, but, 'clean' CO2 sounds preferable over those byproducts. At least CO2 is captured and sequestered by plants.
All my poc are in vanillajs. Quick and dirty.
Dioxins are intermediaries in the process of current wood and coal-burning plants. But they eventually get burned as well.

> The gas-phase dioxins can be substantially destroyed using catalysts, some of which can be present as part of the fabric filter bag structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration#Dioxin_cracking_i...
If it was God, it would beg the question, who created God?
This sounds like something I'd be interested in learning more about. Do you have a couple examples of said data reconciliation issues, and the corresponding accounting approaches?
I am right now doing one and going with Deno, firebaseauth, redisgraph and redis, not yet decided on css .. might go with the https://gdcss.netlify.app/docs.html
Shout out to the open source Android app Street Complete, which shows you a map indicating missing OSM data points and lets you easily contribute (opening hours, road surfaces, house numbers etc.)

Available in the Play Store and on F-Droid.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost...
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplet...

Edit: Vinnl beat me to it. I need to refresh more often :)
Autonomo-cracy?

Carte blanche seems like the appropriate descriptor, but impossible to shoe-horn in.
Digital Personal Assistants. What we have now are like the early mobile phones: Large, bulky and don't work very well.

Imagine a personal assistant that you could have a full on conversation with. I don't believe this requires full-blown AGI to achieve, but improvements in language and human understanding by ML might get us there.

Think something like the Computer from Star Trek NG.
That's rad, will join the subreddit.

Yeah, I agree about the difficulties of enforcing local usage.

Honestly, it was probably a matter of long distance fees that kept the BBSes I loved well-used and local.

Something similar could be like charging nothing if you sign up providing a valid credit card with its zip code within a list of local zip codes, and charge a much higher rate if it's not.
Yep. VSCode's Rest Client extension is amazing, I can just have plain text files with everything I need to my cloud drive (and maybe even git repo to share with team).
Slightly on topic, a talk by David Beazley where he live codes a Wasm interpreter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUT386_GKI8

He also teaches a compiler a course, https://dabeaz.com/compiler.html

> However, the project is structured in a way to help you succeed.
Show HN: Podcast Search Engine
This reminds of the first (and only) time I had a full 360 degree review: contradictory, zero-context opinions from people I don't know very well who haven't earned the right to interact with me in a way required for this minefield of feedback.
I'd start with a .NET 6 MVC application. The default templates will get you started with robust routing and authentication, and you can back it with anything you want for database access. You might find it valuable to start with Entity Framework (EF) - depending on whether or not you want/like to use an ORM. That would provide pretty robust tools for managing database migrations, etc.

It's "boring" but C# is an extremely developer-friendly language these days, and it's hard to beat the availability of documentation, examples, and libraries.

EDIT: and on the front-end, the MVC templates that Microsoft provides start with Bootstrap. I've found Bootstrap and some native Javascript provides more than enough flexibility for quite a while. Bootstrap is great for an MVP, and has a lot of flexibility to make it look good!
I'm sure at some point down the line, a future generation can use 'old' plastic a a resource. I'm of the (amateur) opinion that plastic should be separated out by type, then stored / sequestered until it can be used as a raw material again, instead of dumped or incinerated as it is now.

Of course, this will take a lot of storage space and logistics, and at the moment it's not cost-effective because plastic is so cheap to produce, but at the same time, I (again as an amateur) see it as a long-term investment.
It took a VERY long time for wood to be digested, and there was way more of it around than plastic.
Ask HN: Science books to read aloud with older child (10)
I'm looking for expository books about science (especially biology and chemistry) that I could read aloud to my son, who is 10.

The books that work best for us are generally those that aren't written for children specifically. Carl Sagan's book "Cosmos" was close, but cosmology didn't grab him.
A new species of millipede has 1,306 legs
Are you seriously suggesting that protesting is an execution worthy offense?
I was working on something just like this myself as a prototype for a kind of "immersive sim" detective game, and experienced the exact same thing. I still really like the idea and hope to return to it someday, but yeah, it's harder to model stuff like that than one would intuit.
how you bootstrapped yourself?
Wow, that's quite the valuation.

I'm not surprised though. There's a ton of hype for the 'metaverse', and for my money rec room is the most impressive example of it out there. It's fun to customize your own room, and there's a TON of really cool user generated space. Like any social media platform, any 'metaverse' will succeed or die based on its adoption and network effects, and Rec Room seems to be far in the lead. Wonder if FB tried to buy them already...
I am a parent myself and I know very good the cost of it, and yes - I think if you enable cartoons on YouTube for your few months old kid - that’s the laziness. You always can find a way to attract and engage your baby without electronics.

You can report me and ban, I don’t mind
> My second screen (an LG) turns the backlight off whenever it's all black.

Did you test that setting every pixel black actually triggers this? Most OS just shut the monitor after inactivity (by ceasing to output video signal, or something like that).
IANA also reserves TLDs like '.test' and '.example' as well as some IDN equivalents.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.html

https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved
Wouldn't counting pulses become a trivial task if the signal is routed into a GPIO?
> that can scale for a few years

I don't think "boring and fast" is the only consideration you should take. You should also consider: "are you going to be able to read your code without wanting to tableflip after a year?"