skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This response is a little on the hostile side and doesn't address the clear problem that there is an economic incentive for arbitration companies to provide resolutions favorable to the company providing their source of income. That is a problem in theory with arbitration when contracts prohibit people from taking the case to court if arbitration doesn't prove fair.

Dismissing posters as "complainers" and arguing that they don't have first hand experience completely skirts around this problem and isn't a reasonable argument.

There also seems to be a flaw with where you suggest people have a bias, then proceed to say maybe the companies should be winning and it's okay to have the bias that "many claims are completely worthless."

Statistics can demonstrate that arbitration is more than favorable in situations where companies did something that should at least require a refund, and this has been brought up as evidence in recent articles.

There simply is no check or balance to such an arrangement where one party picks and pays for the judge and process that will be used to settle a distribute. I find it suspicious that someone wouldn't see this as a challenge.

I've read about the benefits of arbitration in situations where it isn't deployed as such a one-sided method to sidestep the law, but this arrangement isn't one of them.
Divisibility by 7 is a Walk on a Graph (2009)
You failed to explain what was wrong in the comment you accused of being wrong.
Using Async and Await in C# (Part 1)
Posted a day ago at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524820
Avoid NULLs in SQL schemas.

Embrace NULLs in outer joins.
I'm happy to see this small act of encouragement. While this letter may not go viral, it is the small effort and this "unsolicited advice" that leaves great positive impressions on young engineers (men or women).
I agree that investing $100 in a stock isn't worth the time of a bank so the $10 fee they charge to purchase an ETF is high, but I think that would be the case for just about anyone because of the cost of even doing the book keeping, statements, etc. For instance, every ETF I invest in, I get the prospectus in the mail. That costs money to ship every year. They have to manage things like proxies voting as well. It's just not worth it to a bank. The $0.15 a year (15 bp of $100) in fees won't even coverage postage.

Pay-day loans may appear sleazy but the companies that administer them don't have very high margins. There are risks to those loans and the small nature means that fixed costs are spread over a smaller base. You can review the financials of public companies in this space. EZCorp [0] and Cash America International [1] are in that space. Their last profit margins are 4.8% and -0.95%, respectively. Why are they so low? I don't know, but I don't claim to know enough about this market to make broad statements about exploitation or abuse. I just know that, like many markets in the US, there appear to be a low barrier to entry and competition eventually shrinks margins.

Maybe you're right and they're doing some kind of financial trickery to appear as though they aren't making enormous profits, but if you believe that, by all means, enter the industry and change it from within.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=EZPW&source=story...
[1] http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=CSH&source=story_...
Good point, although the requirement is just that they do not cross a 64B cacheline:

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...

8.1.1 Guaranteed Atomic Operations

The P6 family processors (and newer processors since)
guarantee that the following additional memory operation
will always be carried out atomically:
• Unaligned 16-, 32-, and 64-bit accesses to cached memory that fit within a cache line

The first P6 was Pentium Pro, which came out in 1995. It does go on to say that although modern processors will guarantee atomic operations that cross cache lines, it's a bad practice that can badly hurt performance.
It's worth pointing out that Uber has already become massive in China; whenever I'm in Guangzhou there are a ridiculous amount of rides available and you're rarely waiting more than a few minutes.
In the last example, wouldn't a Singleton to represent a null student be more effective since you could do a check for the null student by reference?
Well, it would be if testing x = y produced sane results where one of those is null.

I understand why SQL chooses to treat null as unknown for comparison, but I hate it with every fibre of my being and wish SQL dialects would join the 21st century and let me define alternate concepts of nullity like we can with modern type systems.
If you can classify a people who've lived in Africa for a thousand years as "ex-Phoenician", who came from Syria[1] and Lebanon, you can classify them as "ex-Egyptians" who earlier originated from Egypt from 3000BC[2], then you might as well call them "ex-East Africans", from another few thousand years before, who were really, in the end "ex-Central Africans" from another few thousand years before that.

Central Africa[3] => East Africa => Egypt => Syria & Lebanon, Levant => North Africa.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#/media/...

Britain and Germany achieved outsized power as a poor people in Europe, but you forget Spanish already built a empire spanning between two continents in the 1500's. Before Spain (and the Ottomans), Mongolia was the dominant power, with China and Rome before that. I'm sure you know the Romans came from a small village. China too was borne of two small tribes[4]. Before Rome, it was Greece, and before Greece, it was Cathage, before Carthage, it was Egypt. It goes on and on, and on and on, and everyone has had or will have their turn in being a dominant power of the world[5].

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor#Early_years

[5] Fate of Empire - Sir John Grubb http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...
posted just yesterday (with lots of comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526729
> but arbitration rules don't work that way.

They work exactly that way. If the arbitration company doesn't produce results that favor my company we will dump them as a service provider. Each year, we can run an A-B test, randomly assigning cases to two arbitration companies, and whichever one has a higher win rate for us will stick around next year, and the other one gets fired. After a few years of that we should have a provider that performs really well for us.

http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
The question is whether the world as we know it would even last that long.

I don't see how that is relevant. The world could end tomorrow. Do we just abandon long term data backup?
Just hiring the middle management from Yahoo (Anand) and Motorola (Puneet) does not solve the problem. How on earth such recruitment helps hire the top talent, the talent that can design and write code. Sure, this middle management can use their networks to hire the real programmers; again, this boils down to the pay: pay the competitive rate and equity to the people. But we all know, programmers are seen as fungible.

Once some profession is fungible, it becomes the service sector: There is no need to be trained; there is no need to train. So, this will leave the one group of people: those who are super passionate about programming, and have mastered the stuff. Apply the principle of 'passion' to medicine, law and business: How many of Stanford GSB/HBS MBAs are so passionate about business that money is secondary to them? How many of MD's are so passionate, they pursue medicine to serve the public, but not for money? How many want to go to HYS lawschools to serve the poor in the states?

1. So, make the programming profession like HYS Law, H/S MBA, MD; in which case, you are not going to get enough talent.

2. Make it one for the super passionate, same result as the above

3. Make it fungible like service sector jobs. You can find a lot of talent, but you don't find the quality. This is what has happened in India. Getting an IT job in India is a smart move for average hardworking people, one of the reasons has to do with the reservation system imposed on govt jobs. Even here, people take some training, then present 'fake' experience on resume to get interview calls, if you are not from well known schools. Some do succeed in interviews and work hard on the job.

What is missing here is the lack of true mentorship. When you want to become a security guard in California, you take some 30 hours of training and background check, you will get the guard card and start working for some security guard companies. In Indian IT, it is similar: go to Hyderabad, get 2 months training in Java, present yourself as a guy with 3 years of experience, face three or four interviews, you will get hired by some offshoring companies. They are hired because these candidates are happy to get a job for the least amount of pay.
Korea is the new (or another?) Japan when it comes to quality of goods.
How is this "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women." You don't know what misogny is.

There are true misogynists out there doing real damage to women. But conflating real misogyny to what the author said, which is nowhere even close to misogyny, is actually undermining all the work people are doing to make people aware of real misogyny.
Code Girl the Movie – Review
I just watched the movie Code Girl. What an inspiration for the next generation of startup entrepreneurs! The link is below.

http://www.codegirlmovie.com
I know a Coeliac who is diagnosed properly - with the genetic test showing the relevant genes, then a blood test showing the antibodies and then finally a biopsy showing damage to the gut - and they are older and travel quite a lot. The change over the last decade has been wonderfully beneficial for them. I've seen that observation repeated many times online as well, pleasure at having so many more options than just a few years ago. It's not just about restaurants either, I don't remember there being a gluten free section in the supermarket growing but now they are everywhere (Australia). I've never seen a comment suggesting the other way.

Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations.

This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt.

It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".
I think that is only because black cabs already existed and were so popular in those areas. Uber legitimizes them, whereas before you would have had to worry about getting ripped off.

Suffice it to say, most of those drivers are probably on didi zhuanche and get more business from them than Uber. Its not that Uber is massive, but drivers have no concept of exclusivity so just monitor all the networks they can (even taxi drivers might have used multiple taxing hailing apps before the consolidation).

Didi kuaidi (and Uber) have done the impossible and made black taxis semi legal, since they were a fact of life already. They didn't have to build these markets from scratch, they already existed and were just poorly organized.
Best practices when deploying RTC using open standards
Ideally you'd want your RDBMS to refuse to compile tests like x = y in cases where either x or y could be null. You would have to explicitly handle nulls in boolean statements.
Congrats on inventing skynet.
It looks like the A record is correct, but the AAAA record is not, so those of us with IPv6 see the parking page.
Digital Sundial
There's an app called Robinhood[1] that allows you to trade for free. The purchase window is 24 hours, so I assume they short the stocks or otherwise leverage the daily fluctuations. For a legal way to gamble on the market for medium to long term, I find it intriguing.

[1]https://www.robinhood.com/
How Millennials Are Changing Wine
Options are the PROMISE.

And they should be treated accordingly.
It's obvious that sales pitch will be about "... us becoming google|facebook|apple" tomorrow.

Just not today. Soon. But not today.

That's why it's 95% more wise to take cash today with a smile. Pat them on the back. Don't let them pat you on the back for taking less cash today.
Check http://maintool.me

Very elegant, up to 20 days battery life. Fits on any watch
Exact same way. The only difference is that helium is much less dense than air, so there's a lot less drag and thus the drive is more efficient.
Please read the comments on the post. We addressed the misunderstanding.
I'll never understand why people would rather complicate things in an attempt to avoid null checks rather than provide null checks.
Probably not in Poland (because it was attacked by Germany and SU simultaneously), but elsewhere where Soviets (I am kind here towards Russians) where able to implement, or tried to implement their regime, it was very plausible.

I start with Finland, this was a mixed bag, they were attacked by SU in Winter War and while Finns had allied relations with Germans after that, they kept the promises made in the peace treaty in Moscow and not did help to make Leningrad to surrender (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War).

Baltic states were forced to accept SU military bases right before the start of WWII (as it was later discovered, there was agreement between SU and Germany called Molotov-Rippentrop Pact that divided the countries between SU and Germany in Europe).

Accepting military bases leaded to SU military backed coup d'état in all Baltic states that lead to political murders and repressions (10s of thousands people murdered, 100s of thousands deported (men into labour camps where most of them died and women and children with into Siberia (with 1/2 death rate)). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_occupation_of_the_Balti...

Man made famine in Ukraine should be more well known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

I do not think that you could find any poll from that period, but I believe that you can imagine that this is highly likely that any force that managed to end the horrors was welcomed at least in the beginning.

As you can see, the political situation was favouring the Germans but they managed to turn it around.
HN needs to provide some kind of exception for discussions specifically about Unicode--which may contain examples.
Is the website super slow for anybody? Scrolling takes several seconds on my desktop with an i7 on Chrome and Edge.
How Thatcher killed the UK's superfast broadband before it even existed
Zoho down due to DDOS attack
A Digital Team Is Helping Obama Find His Voice Online
I actually love Graphite's API. I've yet to find another solution that is as easy to use and has as many available functions (http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/functions.html).

For that reason we still use graphite's API, but not the UI or datastore. Whisper nor whatever the newer one is would survive the load we put on it.

Our setup looks like:

grafana -> graphite-api -> graphite-influxdb -> InfluxDB <- statsite (C impl of statsd) <- metrics
I'm not sure your observation is at odds with the assertion made here. We could sexualize mothers while keeping the taboo on mothers themselves being sexual i.e. desiring sex. In fact, the sexualization could even feed off that very taboo.
It's not really a minor increase in cost for ECC ram; the CPU and motherboards that support ECC ram are considerably more expensive. To top it off, many times motherboards cannot support the full capacity of ram with ECC installed; my workstation can accept up to 8GB DIMMs with non-ECC and 4GB DIMMS with ECC.
wrong link to the discussion
Here I was thinking I would read some informative article on graphite, graphene and related carbon derivatives. Dear programmers: pick better names.
> One thing that Naive Bayes sucks at is providing good probabilistic estimates.

This is true based on how it's described in textbooks, but in practice it should always be combined with a calibration algorithm (which add a trivial O(n) cost to the process). The common choices here are Platt [0] or Isotonic Regression [1] (the latter should, itself, be combined with a regularization algorithm because it can easily overfit for outliers).

Given a calibration algorithm Naive Bayes produces probability estimates every bit as reasonable as any other algorithm.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platt_scaling

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotonic_regression
On the surface it was nice and shiny - friendship of the nations. In the core it was the same Russian chauvinism that obsessed all the non Russian nations.

Russians do not understand it till today and are today more and more willing to execute the genocide against their neighbours when given the change (source: following the Russian media) due to aggressive xenophobic media campaign.
Show HN: Inquerest – Postgrest inspired complex url parameter parser
Notes on Introductory Point-Set Topology [pdf]
Meh, it's been cut 16 times and what happened.....

Even if it killed a few people, so..... terrorism only works because everyone runs around after like their heads been cut off.

This doesn't seem to be working that way.

Life spans / productivity might have been increased with people having to go outside and leave the everyday normal.
This is fun, though I did get a lot of non-english ones which I did not understand.
I just accepted a job offer to relocate myself to USA, CA, SF.

Renting a car for now. First month was Chevrolet. Lowest life piece of junk ever driven. Eats gas really well but refuses to accelerate without counseling.

Back where i live I owned Chrysler 300S, 4WD, 5.7L, v8.
Best car ever driven.

Bottom line - only high end american cars are decent. And seriously well built. Anything below that is a wall-mart-ish compromise.

Now i renting Kia Soul. Ugliest looking vehicle ever driven.

Yet: Consumes fuel like a bicycle, leaves all local "coolios" behind on HWY 280 like a charm.
Asians do have a sense to build a lovely cars today if you can live with occasional weirdness. Foundation is good.

Having said that - asian-built stuff in consumer space is hit and miss giving 75% to miss.

I used to do professional photography. That's where the camera cost $8K - just the body.
Top notch quality.

Top notch performance.

Top notch reliability.

It was - Canon 1-class.

Guess where it was made in?

Hint: 5-letter country, and the first letter is not "C".
Hey, I'd be the defendant in a case that may go to arbitration. The company claims that I've committed a violation of their ToU. To the extent that their ToU is a valid contract which I've actually entered (presently a point of dispute), it also stipulates that all non-intellectual-property claims must be settled through a neutral arbitrator.

This actually gives me a little bit of hope, because if it happens, I may be able to sway the arbitrator in my favor, as arbitrators are not bound by case law (currently ambiguous but slightly leaning against me) but their own ideas of fairness and justice.

In an actual court, it'd cost me millions of dollars in legal fees before the case got close to a final resolution, and I personally think it'd be very difficult to get a positive outcome, for a handful of involved reasons. With an arbitrator, the prospect of millions of dollars in legal fees is off the table, and there's no data at all as to the likelihood of success since it seems to be wholly dependent on the actual individual that ends up hearing the case. The case hinges on a modern understanding of a technical issue. If the arbitrator is not tech-savvy, he'd likely favor Big Corp. If he is, he'd likely favor me.

My primary concern is that the arbitrator would want to side with the Fortune 500 company in question here, because they're a Fortune 500 company that can bring his arbitration firm a lot of money. I even have this concern to some extent with bona fide judges, and especially have this concern with regard to international operations. The fact is that there is potentially a lot more to gain by making Big Corp like them than there is by getting a fair result for little old me, who is just a regular chump and unfortunately not one of the wealthiest entities on earth. There's not even really street cred, because most people really like this Big Corp.

Pretty much the only hope I'd have is that the arbitrator, judge, court system, and everyone else involved has a rock solid commitment to justice and fairness, unphased by the allure of Big Corp's massive money-dick wagging all over the place (I should note too that this massive money-dick was substantially involved in creating the legal grey area they're using to go after me in the first place, so maybe that should be a good indicator of my prospects). Can you give me some hope that I'd get a fair hearing?
Because you can forget a null-check, but the type system won't let you forget an option/not_null? It's the same reason we complicate things with type systems in general.
TinyMOD (2011)
Whenever I'm bored I either doodle or randomly recall and work out random tidbits of CS theory. One that I did recently was to work out the DFAs that determine the divisibility by various numbers in base 2. You end up with some neat patterns emerging with primes versus non-primes and other details. You also get the modulus for free if you number your states.
If you don't think the question of whether he's a traitor is relevant, then don't worry about that question. I originally posted this link because people were debating that question.

You said "slandering". That generally implies untruth, but the only thing you've really pointed to is non proportionality, which is kind of weird (does every article need to include every single fact at all relevant to the case? Presumably not, but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?)
Yeah, but that's what Kickstarter decided to become at some point, they weren't always that way. I'm hoping that other crowdfunding platforms don't go this direction, and allow me to choose my risk without opening the creators up to lawsuits (which feels like the most un-Kickstarter thing ever).
Show HN: Turn your desk into a standing desk AND personal health coach
50 Tools for Tracking and Managing Multiple Contractors and Consultants