skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are relying on GPS positions, then with AGPS I believe it is accurate to about 8 meters, and cellular GPS is about 600 meters and GPS itself is about 10 meters.

So basically, a driver doesn't have to go up your driveway. He just needs to pass by your house. And there is no way for UPS to ever know, unless they have video but I'd never allow them to video on MY property.

UPS are stupid if they think that such micromanagement is good for their business. There problems appear to be:

1. They set unrealistic deadlines,

2. They don't treat their workforce with much respect. This leads to unintended consequences - like for example you not receiving your package, or higher levels of car crashes, or people jay walking, or increased injuries from strain and fatigued workers.

Honestly, in a system that tracks this many variables, it doesn't take much for an employee to figure out how to game the system! An example is given in the article - the employee who buckled the seatbelt and then sat with it behind his back!

This is honestly a manifestation of an idea that Bruce Schneier made some time back - the more you add restrictions or monitor someone, the more they will attempt to bypass your systems in order to get their job done (or more likely - meet your metrics). The employee does it because the risk of losing their job for non-performing is less than the penalty for getting caught. [1]

3. This is a great way to unionise your workforce and get strike action taken against you. This level of micromanagement tends to be favoured by control freaks and power crazed managers who misuse the data. It also causes problems when the data is followed without knowing a more holistic view of the system. I've seen thus in call centres - the best ones I've seen have had no KPIs, the ones with strict call time KPIs have led to dreadful customer service as the entire goal of the operator is to get you off the phone, not resolve your problem. In that situation, they tell the customer literally anything in order to keep them happy but make them hang up.

Giving this level of metrics to lower level managers is a bad idea, instead I truly believe it should be kept with people who know how to handle data and interpret the results correctly.

---

Footnotes:

1. https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/08/people_unde...
Scare quotes are also bad composition. Since the author is the author, the author should word concepts correctly and take full responsibility for word choice.
Yeah, YouTube I knew about (though they do make the option a bit harder to find than they should) but AFAIK, there are no equivalents for Vine, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Facebook embeds I haven't looked at, though.
This is more likely to be the case from the transition from independent power generators to the electrical grid.
The very first example is stupid. What sane language would assume a non-empty string should be converted to a False boolean?
I Won Millions in Daily Fantasy–and Even I Want Changes
Greece is an outlier. You'd be better off looking at Australia.
From within, a monoculture is easily mistaken for an absence of ideology.

From outside, this thread looks like a set of mocking, contemptuous dismissals of anyone who doesn't agree with that ideological monoculture. Even without any dissenting thoughts, it remains a flamewar; just a flamewar with only one side. Perhaps I'm alone in finding that a little creepy.
Beautiful. And you're on to something.

So what should be our next steps?
I think it depends on the culture of the site. Instagrams are seen as a bit more personal than tweets or YouTube videos. It's also less obvious that the author might be someone else when it's an image as opposed to a tweet or a video.
$250K buys a lot of NetJets time as well.
I suppose Mozilla is trying to walk a fine line, but with Tiles, it just uses a band-aid to hide a gangrenous condition. Adtech is toxic to UX and will never become less so on its own. We should have zero qualms about using ad blocking tools, because only drastic measures might force advertisers to adjust. Publishers should be rallying against adtech and not users. Mozilla is on the wrong side of this debate too. A band-aid will not fix the rotten fetid UX that adtech brings - there was plenty of time to improve. It's time for cutting as far as I'm concerned.
I don't go that far, but I do whitelist cookies.

Lately I've noticed a lot more sites that either just show "turn cookies on" or get into an endless redirect loop of trying to set a cookie and refresh.

That does not bode well for the future of my privacy.
Certainly these telematics are problematic, from a social perspective. They drive the last ounce of productivity out of people. I find them somewhat repulsive because they are a top down authoritarian way to drive up productivity and squeeze out the last pockets of air in inefficient systems --the problem is people were not built to perform at 100% all the time. You need BS time. Time to relax a bit.

That said, these jobs will be on their way out, once automated cars get here. There is no reason they can't have delivery vans 24 hrs a day with people self-servicing the receiving process. They could deliver at the workplace, at home, wherever you choose.

In the end, as dehumanizing as this telemetric supervising is, these jobs are on their way out.

PS. Key stroke monitoring has been a thing at some tech companies for a very long time. Also, many of the current tech darlings have monitoring built in to their internal tools. Or, wonder why we don't see more non sanctioned internal substantiated product leaks?
This would indicate to me that they don't trust their managers to manage.
I don't understand. Can you go into detail?
The average defendant in the US is poor or indigent, often lacks much of a formal education, and is usually at the mercy of whatever overworked public defender they were assigned. Go ask any lawyer you know about how much weight their demands carry or how realistic a chance they have of getting evidence that has the patina of scientific certainty thrown out. I bet you discover they have about as much hope of that as a gnat trying to stop a locomotive.
That's why you should inject defects into your code, to see whether your tests catch them. There are tools to do that automatically.
Yes, indeed, that's one of the ways :) Just post your comment under the article and we'll discuss
actually almost none of these seem like wats to me.. Just what I would expect.

The one wat was adding a float to a huge integer. Granted, I assumed something fishy might happen with such large numbers, so I steer away from doing those operations.
Tacit, a CSS Framework Without Classes
Superscript: South Korea celebrates an ingenious writing system
The stats don't quite work like that. As others have said the vast majority of fatal accidents are down to some form of either direct pilot error (eg putting the plane into a spin at low altitude) or very poor decision making (eg taking off into severe icing conditions in an airplane not equipped to deal with such conditions).

The way I usually explain it is to say that in a car you are much more at the mercy of other drivers. A huge percentage of people killed driving are killed by drivers of other cars. In an airplane nearly all accidents involve only one aircraft. With that, and the fact that so many accidents are pilot indiced the stats for a well trained conservative pilot are far far better than "average." Good pilots constantly re-train and do things like read NTSB reports to minimize this risk as far as possible.

There's still a "crap happens" factor (eg catastrophic mechanical failure) that can take down even the best of pilots but nothing in life is completely devoid of "crap happens" risk.
Finished. Was a pretty good video. I did a write-up of it below on Schneier's blog to justify eliminating C because it's provably Bad by Design. All due to limitations of the PDP's and, new to me, the EDSAC. Also more of a rip-off of BCPL than I thought before.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/friday_squid_...
> At Volume Pricing 8 Bit PICs are pretty much incomparable to ARMs. A quick check on Digikey shows that for 10000 pieces, the cheapest 8 Bit Micro is a PIC10 - 35Cents/Unit (that's for today only)... The cheapest ARM Cortex M3/M0 or even a ARM7 is $1+.

I don't think that statement reflects the situation today.

Cost differences at the low end have become increasingly narrow, where they are present at all. Using just Digikey pricing at 10k, as above, it's easy to find M0/M0+ parts in the range of $0.40--$0.50/ea at 10k.

> The smallest 8 Bit micros from Atmel or Microchip or any 8051 is around 3x3mm. Most ARM micros are much larger.

These parts are obviously available in a range of package sizes, but the smallest M0+ MCUs are also 3x3mm.
I love being a parent. But I am beginning to intensely dislike other parents in my generation. I grew up with overprotective asian parents, but American millennial parents are a whole level of crazy above that.
Good advice
Concrete cures. Drying is a misnomer.
The indexing with a float was on a dict. If you can index with a string, why not a float? If it's hashable, it's good!
OCaml's parsing rules are pretty opaque sometimes. For example, if you have an "if" statement that's just performing effects (not returning a value), you may run into behavior like this:

# let x = ref 0;;
val x : int ref = {contents = 0}
# let y = ref 0;;
val y : int ref = {contents = 0}
# if false then
x := 1;
y := 1;
;;
- : unit = ()
# (!x, !y);;
- : int * int = (0, 1)
# y := 0;;
- : unit = ()
# if false then
let z = 1 in
x := z;
y := z;
;;
- : unit = ()
# (!x, !y);;
- : int * int = (0, 0)
Glass music
In Manhattan I see bunch of kids in the subway going to their school on their own. They make the subway compartment so noisy I usually avoid it :)
> Just wait a generation.

There are still plenty of people who have grown up with games as a normal part of life that look down on those who play them as wasting time and hold it as a badge of honour when they no longer play them, as though this means they have now matured.

Modern sports grew out of gentleman's games in universities, the whole culture was something that people looked up to as civilized before it came to be something everyone 'participated' in.

> At low to medium levels sports probably helps academic performance

I don't believe the parent was talking about actually playing sports, which would help, but was more talking about the Sunday Afternoon Football game where it is socially acceptable to sit and watch the game and associated commentary for hours
Yup. If hash(x) == hash(y), then some_dict[x] and some_dict[y] will return the same value. The int/float is just a convenient red herring on that one, since it's an easy way to get two different-looking keys which hash the same, combined with the double red herring of the initial "can't index" example being a list (which does require integer values for indexing).
How many of them are just doing it for money since salaries are high right now? How many of them actually would do it if it paid 50k instead of a 100k?
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That's quite a short trip.
The current cultural trend in the United States is essentially that its citizens are helpless and need the government to do everything for them and to protect them from themselves. ;-)

If two parents left for work and let their 6-year-old walk to school, they'd be risking serious legal trouble and/or the possible confiscation of their child by the government.
Or, the wages are so low is because humans are inherianty cheap, and willing to exploit people especially when no one is looking.

Would this website work if they required a clear picture of the work provider, and a brief resume?
>Detection is obsolete given the number of zero days exploited in the recent past

Not in the majority of the cases. Widespread attacks from botnets very rarely use zero days. Unless you company is special enough to be targeted, most of your attacks will not be zero days.
This is simplicity at its best.

Hope you won't corrupt it by inserting Ads.
Data collection and paradox
isn't it doing the opposite? str(False) is the string "False", which bool() casts to True because it is a non-empty string; Non-empty strings are cast to True booleans.

This is much faster than checking if the string has some semantic meaning first, which would have to be localized.
Parse is Down
Guessing that's Nautical Miles and not Nano Meters.
I'm not a materials scientist, but I bet this has a good deal of vertical strength, but almost no lateral strength. Probably limits its utility quite a bit.

But, still really interesting.
I feel like I may be missing some of what you're trying to communicate. I agree that injecting defects can help test a test suite and that this can be a good practice. I don't quite see the relevance to the issue I described.

Edited to add - thanks for responding, by the way. I'm confused by all the down-votes.
And if it were true, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a glut. CS is, to some extent, the new mechanical or electrical engineering. ME and EE are very broad degree programs, with students coming out of the same university with totally different specializations. They may have only taken 50% of their courses in common with each other. CS is (or depending on the school, is going) in that same vein.
What passes for DNA matching in U.S. courts is about as fit for purpose as "lie detectors" or "breathalizers". When the purpose is enabling police and prosecutors to put people behind bars with impunity, and justice being "seen to be done", they fit quite well.

I'm not quite sure if the situation around the world is much different, but I would believe that we're a little more sane in Europe when it comes to admitting evidence based more on witchcraft than solid engineering.
Public defenders are at least politically and professionally incentivized to win cases even if they are not provided the resources to do so. In my county, the appointed defender is private and is paid per case. He is strongly incentivized to take as many cases as possible and spend as little time as possible actually defending people. "Take the plea deal" might be the best advice, but only because the system is rigged against the defendant. You don't have to be poor or indigent, either. The middle class are also in danger and even if they win their case their lives are often ruined and they experience significant financial hardships.
As an outsider is it possible to do game development in an Agile manner?
> Don't presume to know things about other people...

That would be why I started my initial comment with questions, rather than presuming that I knew your background and knowledge and launching into poorly-formed and ill-founded accusation and/or assertion. :)

I'm trying to have a serious, level-headed discussion about a topic that is -inexplicably- sensitive for a few groups of people. In order to do so, I need to discover the pertinent information about the background and knowledge of my conversation partners.

> If you actually meant services, then what's your point?

I did. That would be why I asked about services rather than RC systems. :) I know that many people don't work this way, but if you can try to keep in mind [0] that I try hard to say what I mean, and leave nothing but white noise in between the lines of my statements.

Anyway, my point is this. You said:

> I'd take systemd over sysv init, atd, crond, three or four watcher daemons, syslog, various other semi-maintained tools that replicate each other's functionality...

which I took to be a little strange. It seems like this is your understanding of the typical set of services a Linux system runs, but it doesn't jive with how either I or my handful of professional sysadmin friends run our systems. We generally don't run atd, leave any FS watching up to the software package that actually needs it, avoid using tools that duplicate each other's functionality like the plague, and tend to not use unmaintained software... unless it's clear that that software is "done".

I've known several friends and acquaintances who have gone off to work for Red Hat. They've -to a man- come back with some really strange, very hard-line positions about how Linux systems are "supposed" to work. One of them vehemently insisted that -because of the complexity of dependency management and testing- a highly-flexible, rolling-release distro like Gentoo Linux was impossible. [1] Because of my personal experience with how Red Hat seems to have enweirdened some of my friends and acquaintances, and because I knew next to nothing about your background, I wanted to ensure that you had indeed stepped out of the Red Hat bubble and seriously looked at what other companies and distros consider a typical set of services and the features provided by and operation of their sysvrc replacements.

[0] I won't fault you if you can't. I have quite a difficult time remembering what I had for breakfast, let alone the rhetorical styles of the couple-dozen one-off Internet conversation partners that I've had over the past several months. :)

[1] Note that his position was not "Only a fool would attempt to provide guaranteed enterprise support for any and all arbitrary Gentoo Linux configurations because of $COMPLEXITY."! I can't argue with that position. I asked him if perhaps he misspoke and that maybe this or something similar was closer to his actual position. He vehemently denied that it was, and doubled-down on his original statement.
The Spy Chief Who Lied
> The reason games have these launch problems is that publishers got away with it for too long. Having users who already paid for the game do the beta testing is much, much cheaper and more efficient than in-house testing.

I'd say the main reason is that video games companies are usually run by a bunch of amateurs who are good at a few particular things (coding, design, creativity, and maybe even "hyping" things) but have shortcomings when it comes to engineering and delivering consistent, solid quality. Many companies dont have regular processes, and rely on employees forsaking weekends in order to deliver things on time.

I know it's usually not popular here to talk about the necessity of Project Managers, but the Video Games Industry is a pretty good example of an situation where more (i.e. better) management could help make things better compared to the current mess.
I think it's the same with finance, right? Lots of people follow the money --whether it be finance, CS, law, med-school.

Personally I think it's BS for people to tell you to "follow your passion" and also am critical of the "we need people who are passionate about x". Most people work as a way to make a living.
Maidsafe ... should be a solution to the datacenter problem. Ultimately we want to aim for a completely decentralized/distributed internet where a virtually infinite amount of available resources (CPU+storage+bandwidth) can be summoned on demand from anyone participating in the network, -AND- expect people to get paid for donating these resources. I remember an HN article like a week or two ago on IPFS, another step in the right direction..

This will be the undoing of the datacenters - the problem is, there's ZERO incentive for the millions of connected users to donate their resources and unless this changes, the decentralized internet will remain a pipe dream.

The problem with Maidsafe is they've been working on it forever....
unfortunately prosecutors are almost entirely immune to civil legal action.
Easy. Sociopaths. They are insect minds wrapped in human skin. Wolves in sheep's clothing if there ever was such a thing.
Heating milk for a baby on a stove in a pot of water is an ancient American trope in media, so perhaps you just ran into an individual idiot and made the mistake of extrapolating from a single case.
I do not trust child protection services, they mean well but they overuse their power on a 'feeling' and worse, 'career advancement'.

My family was completely ripped apart and destroyed by the child protection services in the UK.
nope. Here I use the trick that for most ints, hash(i) == i to quickly find two values with the same hash and put them in a dict.

>>> k1 = "foo"
>>> k2 = hash(k1)
>>> hash(k1) == hash(k2)
True
>>> d = {k1: "v1", k2: "v2"}
>>> d[k1]
'v1'
>>> d[k2]
'v2'

Now that I've been pedantic, I hope I get this right: in Python, it is equality (==) that defines same-ness for dicts and sets. But if x == y, then you have to ensure that hash(x) == hash(y). Python uses this characteristic to make the initial check for dict and set membership integer comparisons on the hash, but when two items have the same hash, Python goes on to distinguish them on the basis of equality.
It seems if you were selling a used car for $20k that you might have the forethought to request a cashier's check from a reputable bank. Easier in many ways than living with the terrible toll of worrying about walking around with 20k in your pocket...
There are many groups working on non-invasive technologies that do the same using EEG. One commercial example, which I'm told is quite good: http://www.intendix.com
> Seems like a perfectly fine thing to do to restore service during an outage, as long as they're rolled back or reviewed later.

Rolling back later seems to forgotten in most cases (unless it's disabling a feature). Then you end up with this weird behavior and code path that few remember. "Oh yeah we did that when...." You usually only rediscover it after that quick hack is a problem. This is decades of experience here.
Excellent related documentary- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ET4bbkTm0
> New York Times, [...] the BBC

If you set your bar this low, did you have to dig a trench first? What did you do when you hit the water table? Did ground heat ever become a problem as you edged closer to the Mantle?
What assumptions?
maybe they shouldn't be. but the prosecutors aren't responsible the labs are.
And the same can be said of many Men...

The first thing that came to my mind, is that many girls that are interested in this stuff may now feel more comfortable than ever to enroll in Computer Science, as the issue of sexism is being tackled and talked about a lot.
What are the best learning hacks that you know?
A lot of people feel that they get new ideas and solutions to problems while on psychedelics.
Centralized operators have much better economies of scale and are able to specialize in fields that are non-core to other industries, like security.
Obama Won’t Seek Access to Encrypted User Data
ditto. Both parents were working like the majority of the parents back then in the USSR, and there were no chance for them to get us to and from school. And outside of school, we were roaming streets and forest/seashore around the city completely on our own.
This is so cool.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365715
Honestly, I hate articles like this because they always fail to recognize the biggest asshole, the landlords who extract economic rent from everyone and prevent all progress because increased supply makes their properties less lucrative.

It shocks me to see brand new condos going up in the city that are 4-5 stories tall when cities like Paris and Munich have shown that you can have human scale living at a much greater density. Why do new buildings have so few stories? Because landlords in the city heavily lobby for restrictions and challenge every project trying to scale them down. There is enough room for SF to keep its eccentrics and welcome newcomers and that solution is supply.
When I saw the title, my immediate question was “Reversible by who?” The answer seems to be: everybody. With such a structure, anybody could come along and knock it over by simply pulling out the loose string. I’m not sure I’d want to use this for anything important.