skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I paused my software development career to sell cars for a year. I sold cars at two different Honda dealerships, both owned by Fortune 500 companies in, what I believe is, the densest single market for Hondas in the US (Metro DC). There's a couple things missing from the situation as described by the author.

First, dealerships don't really make that much of a profit on new car sales. At least not Honda dealers. Used cars averaged around $1000 profit, but new cars were around $200. Yes, they really do lose money on some sales. That's not to say that there weren't expenses that were being covered in the price that are exclusive to the dealership, such as the salesperson's commission, but the total profit going to the dealership per new car was low. One of the older, wiser managers, who had come from Toyota told me, "A properly-run dealership pays for everything on Parts & Service. Car sales is just the profit." There are a lot of lean years in car sales. I can attest that no one in management was panicking when gas prices hit $4/gallon and we couldn't give a car away (car managers don't hold back their emotions). Sales stopped, but people kept getting expensive oil changes.

Second, at least within Honda's North American division, you cannot just buy inventory. A dealership inventory is controlled in such a way that area dealerships are forced to compete heavily with each other. In order to sell a car, you have to have a car on your lot. In order to have a car on your lot, you have to order it from Honda. The number of cars you can order from Honda is restricted to a percentage of the number of cars you sold last year, something around 106-110%. You can't just take a big loan and buy yourself volume. To a dealer, inventory is life and must be protected. As a salesperson, I would lose so many deals to other Honda dealers who would lie through their teeth over the phone to sell. Dealers will cut their own throats to steal a sale from another dealer because each one is a net +2 in the inventory war. In theory, this is great for customers on cost, but terrible for customers on experience.

The owner of the first dealer I worked for had just sold the dealership to a Fortune 500 company. He spent years and years basically giving cars away until he had the largest inventory on the entire East Coast (a big deal for Honda) and then had something very valuable, something that couldn't be bought. Somewhat like how Amazon, in theory, operates.
Apparently she (and all those watching the project) got spammed so she had to shut down issues - https://twitter.com/Una/status/659128221292605440
I presume these people park somewhere? In the UK my office provides a bog-standard 240V 13A socket - that fully charges me throughout the day.

Installing 1,000 normal electrical sockets in a car park is a chore, but it's hardly the construction project of the century.
So we get our new gadgets on a few hours for less cost to the company, more dollar-cost to us, and in return we have more unemployed people so pay more taxes.

I'm really not a Luddite; we need to find ways to put the tech development focus on things that benefit society as a whole.

/rant
Any examples of usage ?
Assembly lines require a huge investment and cannot scale beyond their maximum capacity. So when a car turns out to be popular, the OEM (the brand that does final assembly) or one of the many suppliers might run into a huge backlog.

That is most pronounced when orders spike after the introduction of a new model.
If you want that then pay for it. Don't force it onto everyone via legislation.
The point of having cars inspected for safety every year or every other year is that their saftey can't be the individuals responsibility only. If you drive without brakes you are dangerous to others.

The simple ocular/mechanical inspection that is used in most places catch obvious problems like rusty brake pipes or bad brake effect. They don't test software issues like whether the stability system is disabled in fifth gear over 50mph due to a buffer overflow.

So while there are similarities between me trying to fix my brakes and me trying to hack the software (Make a change to a car component, if it passes the yearly safety tests it's OK) the software is much harder, or impossible, to test by "external" black box testing that needs to be completed in say 30 minutes by a non software expert.
You can easily make over 100k a year as a dev in NL if you're self employed, assuming you charge 60 an hour (about half the rate a consultancy firm charges customers) and work 1800 hours a year. That way, you have no benefits, no insurance, and no income when you're between projects, but an income that your English speaking peers at least don't laugh as hard at.

I don't think the wages are all that bad considering the generous benefits. What's really killing is the cost of living here.
The mystery of the female orgasm
They're much faster than that. Individual cars are produced in under 24 hours time wise across pretty much every major manufacturer.

There are other reasons than just manufacturing time, for why a vehicle would take weeks or months to get.
I guess No, better ask @Sama. Hopefully you'll take my name :)
Ugh, not this guy again.
Might just be a regulatory reason, though. Not a technical one.
Although his comments are accurate there's nothing terrible profound about them.

For quite a while everybody has realized that out sourcing was never anything more than labour cost arbitrage, dressed up with fairly empty "sales" rhetoric.

However he misses a more fundamental way in which clients and outsourcers interest are misaligned.
Because outsourcers are essentially selling bodies they have no incentive to become more efficient through labour cost reduction.

I suspect this failure is the real reason for the current "in sourcing" vogue. As software development and delivery becomes increasingly automated the labour cost component will drop, along with the pressure to outsource.

The outsourcers business model is fundamentally broken and it's only a matter of time before this shows up in the bottom line.
OnHive.io is looking for a co-founder
Hey guys,

I’m the founder of OnHive.io, a team collaboration platform. I’m also a designer/part-time developer and have been helping to build digital products for the last 6 years.

OnHive is a recent side project of mine and I’ve decided that I want to put more time and effort into it to see if it could be a viable business.

I’d love to partner with a front-end engineer or content marketer who has an interest in team productivity and saas products.

You can find out more about the product here www.producthunt.com/tech/onhive and who I am here https://dribbble.com/SaxonFletcher and here https://twitter.com/SaxonFletcher

If you’re interested, please email me at saxon@onhive.io.

Cheers!
OP here. If you have any questions I'll be happy to address them.
The article is a kind-of blogspam (edit: if the title did include "Korean eunuchs may have the answer"): it seems that BBC produces the similar articles regularly, the process seems to be simply finding the old news and making a new article which includes the "related" stuff in the text, as the subject of the title (with eunuchs) was presented in the paper from 2012:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212...

and it was covered by the media also in 2012, like

http://www.wired.com/2012/09/eunuchs-testosterone-longevity/

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/health/eunuchs-lifespan/

Edit: I don't see any traces of "Korean eunuchs may have the answer" at the BBC page now, though. Then it's just the poster who edited the title? Interestingly, the article author and the poster here share the name and initials: "David Robson" and "d_a_robson." Then, d_a_robson, please don't change the article titles when you post them here, it's against the HN practice.
Well, the whole point of car inspections is that "your responsibility" is not enough. It's possible that you as the owner of a modded vehicle are perfectly fine with the risk of an accident, but the other potential participants of such an accident might not.

I think the question has a point: Modified ECUs are different from modified brakes, because the modifications could likely not be found in an inspection - in fact, according to the exemption, it would be illegal for inspectors to check the ECU. So I wonder how that problem is handled.
I reckon the article is talking about pay before taxes (what the company pays, not what you get) for a senior developer.

AFAIK the number is correct.
>despite evidence

Such as?
It may be because she is a novice developer and not immersed much into the IT world, and not highly qualified yet. With the non-IT people 'freelancer' might look like a nice word for 'unemployed'. Much higher status of an experienced freelancer is undeniable (a $4000 freelancer is solid upper class - able to afford multiple full time home staff - in most of Ukraine)
The problem is that 1998 code will have Monad instances that do not have Applicative as a super class.
Couldn't search for celerities about.me profiles.
> It can't just be refactored by waving a regulatory wand at it and hoping for the best.

No need for anything new, just find the sanest country, and copy their laws.
If games sell well early into their release, the devs would be elated and motivated. Also they would get more money at the time they are hoping to get it.
I had exactly this scenario in mind when I was building Shrine. It has a recache plugin which allows you to do additional processing after validation but before storing, and then you can do the rest of the processing in a background job as part of storing. https://gist.github.com/janko-m/cfc50049c360d5c8be34
Raspberry Pi stays sky high in 2015 Hacker SBC Survey
Being from Moldova, and working on Upwork, I understand what he means... There is a bit of distaste for freelancers because there are a lot of very cheap freelancers working on the local market (because they would not be able to find a good project on upwork) with very low quality of work. All questions go away though when you tell your family how much more money you make.

EDIT: As per sibling comment, there are two types of freelancers: very high qualified or very low qualified. The general public usually hears more about the low qualified ones though.
>Misbehaving kids should get an education--they should just get it in a class with other misbehaving kids.

What specific criteria is there so that we segregate fairly, not based some delusion that normal behaviour between genders are identical?

Teachers (which are overwhelmingly female) overly punish normal behaviour from boys compared to girls. I wouldn't trust their judgment for my children of what misbehaviour is given their obvious discrimination that I've witnessed and experienced.
I would prefer paying for trying. It's added to the price anyway, it would be more customer friendly to have the fees exposed and not bundled with the purchase itself.
Laws are a product of culture. Copying a countries laws, without also copying its culture won't give you the effects you are hoping for.
I think the author has a point, as software development is lot different than most other contracting gigs.

In most successful contracting jobs one would have a very clearly defined scope (processes and materials to be used, what is a clear outcome, etc.).

Software development has lot of ambiguity - processes to be followed, materials (technology stacks) to be used, what is a clear outcome (nobody knows unless it is validated in the field - apart from internal testing scenarios).
Why are drugs illegal?
How I spend 1 month every year commuting
Why would you go this route though? Unless you must do .NET professionally, there's no real reason for devs these days to use anything Windows. It just makes everything much more complicated, and many compromises because of platform readiness of many of the cutting edge projects (everything seems to start today on OSX/Linux).
Interesting. No luck for past one hour, I am facing a i/o timeout for any docker command. Trying to figure out.
For those who don't know, the British were the opium dealers, the Chinese banned the opium and once confiscated it, and the result was the war in 1839:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

"The British East India Company began to auction opium grown on its plantations in India to independent foreign traders in exchange for silver. The opium was then transported to the China coast and sold to Chinese middlemen who retailed the drug inside China. This reverse flow of silver and the increasing numbers of opium addicts alarmed Chinese officials."

"In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor" "confiscated around 20,000 chests of opium." "The British government, although not officially denying China's right to control imports of the drug, objected to this unexpected seizure and used its naval and gunnery power to inflict a quick and decisive defeat."

Apparently, the argument for the war was, familiarly, that China "resisted to the free trade."

Of the opium, peddled by the Brits.
original Markdown?
Wrote a Gist in Git about CSS Media Queries for Desktops, Tablets and Mobiles
It wouldn't surprise me. I remember reading last year that iTunes alone is a larger business than Yahoo. The scale of Apple is unreal.
Hi all! A couple weeks back I realised that I spend 3 hours a day commuting to & from work, equivalent to roughly 660 hours a year, which is pretty much equal to the month of February.

Yep, February. Spending a whole month, night & day, just trying to get to & from work.

As a result, I wrote a blog post about it on my commute that day. Would love to hear your thoughts.
This is why Apple will take over the car industry.

Integrate the best supply chain management, best logistics, best customization processes, best personalization processes, best servicing processes, best retail sales force, best legal compliance/adherence processes.

Then look at how to make a giant iPod on wheels then deploy.
I want to see efficient backends automatically generated from a flat list of assembly instruction descriptions using similar methods.
Thanks for the note, I'll add some more caveats to that section; I don't really know anything about the human vision system. Do you know of any better mathematical models of human perception that I could use to produce more accurate mock-ups?

I've tried on some of the glasses from Meta and Epson that consist of more traditional micro-displays and optics to set a fixed virtual focus plane a couple of metres away. It's definitely possible to shift attention between the real and the virtual, and not feel too distracted even with relatively busy background scenes (using some of the "shades" definitely helps to boost contrast of the virtual content though). When real and virtual are at different focal planes it seemed to make maintaining attention on the virtual content easier, and stereo also seems to help with that.

However the true promise of "Mixed Reality" experiences are when you don't have to choose to attend to real or virtual, but simply look at a part of the combined scene. When virtual and real are so closely connection it seems likely to me that the depth of the virtual content would need to be matched with to the depth of the real world, so the virtual and real focal planes would be the same and the user would lose the ability to use depth cues to direct attention.

If real and virtual are at the same depth, how would you imagine the scene would look? Is the additive mock-up still unrealistic?
Which is, btw, really surprising because the US had a avg. speed of 6.0 in 2013 and 11.5 in 2014, while Germany only improved from 7.7 to 8.7.

IMHO that's really strange...

Did something major happen between 2013 and 2014? Because otherwise I can't think of any reason that would double the average speed of a whole country with a population of over 300 million.
Interesting. Maybe I'm using the wrong browser (default and Chrome), but one of the primary reasons I stick to the FB and Messenger apps is because the browser on my phone (Galaxy S4) basically kills the device. I prefer "sluggish" to "so slow that you want to throw your phone out of the window".
The part that I mind about both delayed_paperclip and carrierwave_backgrounder is that it doesn't really allow you to write your own job classes. This can be quite limiting for example if you want your jobs to send information to some monitoring services.

Another part that I mind is the user experience. Ok, both of these gems allow you to know when the backgrond job is in process, and then you can display some placeholder image until the processing is done. But that's not really nice user experience. In Shrine the user immediately sees the image they uploaded, because it has that image already cached (usually on the filesystem), and then from the user's point of view the uploading is finished, before the background job even started. CarrierWave also has the cached image, but by design it's not possible to use it, while Paperclip doesn't cache images.
Here in Brazil the US Dollar is 1:4 to the local currency (and the value is raising), so right now the exchange rate is really favorable to a customer in the northern hemisphere.
Not only the labor, real estate assets and companies are beginning to look very cheap for foreigners.
Pedantic point: Grace Hopper's work predated FORTRAN by several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC.

FORTRAN is the first general purpose computer language still in use, but that's not the same thing as being the first.
Asch conformity experiments
For a top-level view of the question, it's well worth reading Coase's "Theory of the Firm": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

It addresses the question of why companies exist, rather than adhoc gatherings of independent economic actors held together by contractual relationships. Coase suggests that this is due to "transaction costs" involved in negotiating everything into a written contract structure upfront rather than adhoc managerial coordination as needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_theory_of_the_firm is also well worth reading.
Web Components Are Awesome
Three interesting tidbits from the Wikipedia article about the Librarian of Congress:

> There is no official term limit for the Librarian of Congress, but in the 20th century a precedent was established that Librarians of Congress are appointed for life.

> There is very little legislation for the Librarian of Congress or rules regarding who should be selected for the position. In 1989, Representative Major R Owens (D–NY) proposed a bill in Congress that would set stricter requirements for who may be appointed. (...) This bill did not pass.

> James H. Billington has served as Librarian of Congress since 1987, and announced plans to retire from that post in 2015.

This sounds to me as if the position hadn't really been designed for the amount of power that it has been given now by the DMCA. With a vacancy apparently right ahead, wouldn't that make it the next prime target for lobby efforts or corruption?
Be happy that you have access to Internet in Europe. I'm sitting in an international corporation's office in Shenzhen, China, and I have to do absurd amounts of dancing with VPNs to be able to leave a message for my family. Oh, and I have to do it on my own mobile connection, because no way a VPN over corporate network will last more than 30 seconds.

:(.
As a Brit of similar age, who went to uni I can totally relate to everything and it was a very enjoyable read and a trip down memory lane.

It is very interesting to see how the drinking culture has been shaped and how that we are sheep by partaking. Well in a way we are sheep and wolves.

Because there is something in drinking culture in the UK that is about 'egging on' other people to drink more, so if someone who is known to drink decides to take it easy (like just drink a bit slowly) then they are often cajoled into drinking more.

In addition there is the social pressure of buying rounds, so the next drink is always coming and many pints of beer all on the table at once. And you have to buy your round or you are a cheapskate - even if you didn't drink as much on the other rounds!

Then in the workplace there is the bonding and social cohesion you miss out on if you abstain at work lunchtimes or functions. Drinking increases your chance of greasing the wheels of promotion and advancement. I've worked places where people would get drunk at lunchtime. And not always on a Friday!

I'm glad it is at the peak and now declining. Probably a good thing.

Living in Australia now. Drinking culture is definitely less but it is certainly there. I think the fitness and coffee culture trumps it.
Which of the 11 American nations do you live in?
If you start with a few stock models, and then all you're picking is the colour of the paint and the style of the seats and a few other bolt-on parts; then no, it should not really take long.
In "Europe"....again you are trying to make it sound like everywhere is the same. I've bought many new cars in "Europe" and it was always off the lot. I'm really not interested in waiting 5-6 months for a new car. Especially since waiting time for some, like the new Range Rover is 12-18 months, which is just insane. If you don't have a car in stock, I'm walking out of the dealership.
Hi, just have a look here : http://phili.pe/posts/postgresql-on-the-command-line/
Well the fact that they are accepting them and their request means that yes they are opening their arms. Whether some part of their population is not happy or not is beyond the point.

Swedish student debt? For those that studied in a private university maybe. For the rest it is negligible in comparison to student debt in the US.
Thus the billions of dollars of VC and fighting mentioned above.

In the context of what you've written, though, can you explain why Tesla chooses to sell directly to consumers?

They have the ability to sell through dealers, just like the established automakers. And it would cost them a lot less money and hassle to do so.

Why then would they choose to sell direct if not that it actually made good business sense to do so.
Nope, with some cars the next available spot in factory is months and months away. Try ordering a new Range Rover - standard wheel base model can now be ordered for the end of 2016, long wheel base you would get delivered around March 2017 if you ordered one now. Apparently that's because there's only one assembly line in their factory in Solihull, and there's thousands and thousands of orders from all over the world.

To be fair, waiting time for a new Qashqai(which is a very popular car) is still 3-4 months, because the factory is that busy.
What was that discussion about the Internet of Things manifesting like "haunting"? That people would engage in ritual activities in the hope of fixing their technological problems, because understanding your IoT devices or even knowing how many you had would become impossible?
Our way to Go
> That's a lifetime of job security

Maybe only 10 years?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-far-can-voy...
Individual contractors can and do work well in client organisations. Separate scaled up consulting and outsourcing businesses are the problem IMHO, and this is what the article argues too.
Except that the factories are already booked out several months in advance. Manufacture of a car takes less than a day, delivery can be done within a week, but that doesn't help if the nearest available slot in the factory is 4 months away.
Just bordering? Seems full on creepy to me.
Not convinced about this mob:

https://auth.startssl.com/
Europe seems like an interesting country indeed. In many countries on the continent we call Europe, it works differently. I'm in a european country, and next-door to my office is a Porsche dealership where new cars roll out daily, filled with young men satisfied they used their whole bonus.
Little secret: you can probably get away without paying taxes on that money in Ukraine.