skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe this is true, and there probably are things that could be done to "disrupt" both these markets.

YC (and to a lesser extent Silicon Valley itself) have union-like characteristics. Why is it that a bunch of companies working on distributed networks that are designed to permit easy global communication have to be located within 20 miles of each other and consequentially forced to spend sizable percentages of their investment capital propping up an absurd real estate market? This is being disrupted by things like AngelList that make it easier for startups in more reasonable local markets to raise capital on an open flat market.

The death of Detroit wasn't caused by the death of cars. The automobile market has grown since the 1970s. It was caused by the global geo-diversification of the automobile industry. I wonder if the same thing could happen to SV (and YC) as a result of similar disruptive market shifts in the IT/Internet/tech markets. Since investors are to a great extent the customers in this market, the shift could come if investors see superior returns from companies outside the SV/YC orbit and decide that paying the Valley Tax is not justified. Also like Detroit, SV's cliquish quasi-unions are perhaps a bit smug and self-satisfied and don't see it coming.

I'm not sure how you'd go about disrupting the "CEOs union." Let's make the question more concrete: what value does a union hire like Condi Rice (just using her as one example) bring to Dropbox and how might a startup replace that with something more efficient? I personally don't know enough about the high corporate world to know the answer, but I suspect a few around here do and might have some ideas. Maybe it would be possible to leverage your customer base. If you have something people love -- like AirBnb for example -- and are getting flak over it, which would be cheaper: to mobilize your customers or to hire a $200m/year CEO with government connections?
The bug is that doing deserialization safely is difficult in the presence of inheritance, since it's an open-world type system.

If a serializable object contains a field of type Foo, this implies that all subtypes of Foo can be transmitted, whether they were designed with serialization in mind or not. This is especially bad for commonly used base types such as List or Exception. At the limit, if you have a field of type Object or Any, there's no choice but to use an explicit whitelist.

Contrast with how Go does unmarshaling in its standard library (which works with structs and arrays but not interfaces), and functional languages (which use unions in the form of algebraic data types, not inheritance). These are closed-world type systems where we can generate the whitelist by walking the type tree from the base type.
* I'm South African living in Houston, TX. *

I am sorry, what is "here" then here?
I've never been able to use my smartwatch (Pebble) frequently enough. It's a combination of battery life and the fact that it doesn't look enough like a real watch. This might change that for me.
> Redefining words like this harms clarity of communication.

I've yet to read TFA, but, I disagree with this. Natural vs artificial is a false dichotomy, and the existing definition of nature (a biblical remnant) is hampering our ability to envision our world properly, form IT to GMO to medically assisted procreation to climate change to general AI.

Humans are primates, we're part of nature as is everything we create. Artificial just is a subset of natural.

What is evolving is the information vector.

It's been DNA for billions of years, then culture (brain to brain), which actually predates humanity. Big cats learn hunting by imitation. Birds of the same species but of different locations sing different, learned songs, non human primates communicate symbolically and have regional accents.

We refined language, oral communication and developed mnemonic techniques like story telling, singing and poetry, which all must have been technological revolutions when they were invented (technology is a subset of culture).

We then started to externalize it with engraved, then manuscript then printed writing.

Then off course came telecommunication and computers, which are able to manipulate information independently.

This has been a continuum, and trying to set humans aside just because you happen to be one is a mistake.

On one side, you have green nuts who reject en masse nuclear energy (which would help mitigate the ongoing greenhouse cataclysm) and GMO (Monsanto's practices and products are horrible, but one shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater). On the other one you have conservatives who reject social and reproductive progress because it goes against imaginary "laws of nature".

Now general AI is around the corner, and brains will likely go the way of the dodo.

We're going to get squeezed between global warming/ocean acidification and the robotic revolution. That's not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, but it won't be pleasant when it occurs.

If we want a chance to make the right decisions to make it at least less painful, we should be armed with the best available mental tools, and putting ourselves out of nature is a basic mistake that we should avoid. We're not magic.
Security is an extra cost that people pay.

It does not produce food or produce anything. It only protect what you are producing or providing.

Why should anyone spend money protecting cabinets from vandals when there's no vandals.

Our society is also full of soft targets. Think events with crowds, or perhaps the malls and other area where it's clouded. Maybe you could jam the interstate system by strategically crashing cars at the same time.

Should we then spend money on providing more well armed security guards? Creating excess amount of roads that nobody can fully utilize?

Should we be terrified of highly competent boogeymen whose goal is to cause mayhem and chaos?
Bit of nonsense there:

> Yamamoto [president of Lexus] should heed what his local peers are doing, and look for ways to move more production offshore. As Apple demonstrates, a widely dispersed supply chain can be quite consistent with premium branding.

Cars and consumer electronics are completely different. Apple products are made of chips made in huge fabs, LCDs made in special factories, PCBs populated by machines, and a bit of special sauce here and there (Aluminium casings, gorilla glass, etc.)

Car manufacturing is just much heavier, just like the products.
On a related note, I am currently working on digitizing and indexing metadata about my collection of over 10,000 antique postcards, a large portion of which date from 1890-1910 or thereabouts. If anyone else has a collection and is interested in collaborating, let me know.
I don't think this is a continental divide at all. I think what PG said here would be considered reprehensible to a lot of Americans, and I count myself among that contingent.

This isn't demonstrative of a divide between continents, this is a musing of a man so far out of touch with regular society that he sees a large swath of society as an inefficiency waiting to be obsoleted by a tech startup (which would presumably increase his personal wealth in the process).
The best cities to get ahead are often the most expensive places to live (2014)
Being omnivores our senses help us to distinguish good food from bad. For example we prefer sweet food because sugar in nature is rare, the fruits delivering sugar being a source of carbohydrates, vitamins and other essential nutrients. We avoid bitter plants because that's usually the taste of substances that do us harm. And rotten meat disgusts us. Plus we rely on the wisdom of our ancestors to know what to eat.

But the food industry, in all its wisdom has produced foods that (1) lie to our senses, (2) are rich in calories, but poor in nutrients and (3) are so novel that our bodies aren't digesting it properly.

Being a consumer is actually easy, if you can read the signs. It's the food industry that's feeding you the lie that nutrition is complicated and needs expert guidance. Does the food come in a package? Does it make health claims? Is the list of ingredients containing substances you don't recognize? Is sucrose or high fructose corn sirup one of those ingredients? Does it come from far away? Is it sold in a super market?

All of those are red flags you should watch out for ;-)
Translation: if you have no skills yet or have zero ability to market them and win clients, then this is for you.

> Last but not least: People who do this will have much easier access to locals (after all you share an office) and therefore a much more intense travel experience.

Not to be rude, but you don't sound like someone who has traveled and worked as a lifestyle... What do you think people who travel as digital nomads do?
It apparently has a data density similar to blu-ray. A better source: http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2014/10/141020a.html
I'm not the person you are replying to, but do you have a recommendation for a book on the Songhai Empire?
Do you think that priests are more likely to be honest than lawyers? Why?

What do you mean by "dirty"?
Do you think that lawyers are more likely to be dirty than priests? Why?
Toyota in China (made in China) is crap compared to Toyota everywhere else. One thing: the factories don't invest much in automation given cheap labor costs. But a robot is going to be much more precise than a human, so the resulting product shows many more imperfections.

I wouldn't be surprised if the data on quality in China is incredibly fudged. China isn't known for releasing great accurate statistics.
Ask HN: How someone can start work on/find part-time freelancing projects?
For those who work on part-time jobs as contractors on freelancing projects. How can someone with professional experience get started and find one of both consulting & software freelancing projects ?.
I have some free time, and I would like to know how can I start finding these jobs.
I tried using ODesk, but unfortunately, the level of projects submitted by most clients is vague (without clear milestones), in addition to that the level of price competition is very low (for someone living in expensive city). I tried also "who is hiring", but most of companies look for full-time employees, not seasoned data engineerS/data scientists, who can work on part-time projects (approximately: 5-4 hours a day).
Please, share your experience with us ?
I'm a Software Engineer and have taken multiple extended trips leaving "gaps" on my CV.

I became a snowboard instructor and kayak guide for a couple of years, then worked for a couple as a programmer, then spent two years driving Alaska->Argentina, before working 4 years in IT again. Now I'm taking 3+ years off to drive around Africa.

In my experience, "gaps" on my resume have not been an issue. In fact, I put that time front and center, to show my resourcefulness, ability to teach myself Spanish, think on my feet, etc. etc. I'm asked about it in interviews, and I've never seen it affect my chances negatively.

While I have not climbed the corporate ladder like my friends I graduated with 10 years ago, I have not experienced any problems finding work because of "gaps" on my CV. I genuinely think that's a common myth created to stop people taking time off.
An attacker might just need to get something to show up into a log file that is then viewed using PuTTY. Always escape attacker-controlled data before logging or displaying it.
In fact they did, Carthage and Egypt. These African powers at the time competed against the Romans and Greeks to the north.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Carthage
Tangential: does anybody know how dependable is pg_repack[1]? I just discovered it and the promise is great - being able to do a VACUUM FULL, and even move tables around, without locking them and thus without downtime - but I'm not sure what are the risks in using it in production.

[1] http://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/
One thing that baffles me is how the Kindle version is more expensive than a used copy.
Apart of other replies, there is also no evidence that is any better for than conventionally grown produce.
You are paid only in food and accommodation. This initially stuck me as terrible, but then I noticed that the company only hooks you up with startups local to where you are travelling. This is not remote work so do not expect 'back home bucks'.

The requirement for a LinkedIn page is sub-optimal. Allow a Github login plus CV, maybe?
Maybe this would be a good medium for http://cosmicos.github.io/
Brooklyn teacher launches sharing economy marketplace for micro-schools
Organic isn't bullshit however, asking for organic worldwide exclusive of anything else, would let people starve.

So, it's baby steps. We've learned to hybridize to improve yields and learned how to fertilize to improve yields. Both of these innovations have allowed to world to grow without widespread malnutrition (as we used to have).

Now we have an opportunity to innovate farming methods to rely less on poisons while improving yields on traditional farming (non-modern farming). It's one of those things where it's difficult to impossible to achieve without the ugly stage (given the parameter of a world not starving to death in the meantime).
"Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast ... CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s."

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong.
The feeling of finishing a task is a really big driver for me. It also helps me know when I can stop dedicating mental resources to something and move on--which leads to the trap of fixating on one thing and putting a lot of effort into it.

I think I will do exactly what you suggest, and pick something that's more fun to work on next, rather than what I think I "ought" to.
A fairly rushed conclusion... "Making these changes will require a complete reorganization of these companies' fundamental business models and global supply chains, but, ummm, hey, they have the money! Right? The end."

If only it were that simple.

The government subsidizes corn and soybeans, which is why they're everywhere and in everything. Derivatives from corn and soybeans account for a staggering proportion of the ingredients, 'natural' and 'artificial,' that appear in the staple products offered by most of our biggest food companies. They're also the feed that raises all of our meat. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that corn and soybeans are the nation's food supply. They are pretty much the only crops we can grow cheaply at massive mega-scale, and we derive almost all our nutritionally questionable foods from them.

Transforming businesses the scale of McDonald's and General Mills will require nothing short of a complete overhaul of our current agricultural economic policy. Best of luck with that...

For a more insightful article with a deeper look into the issue, I recommend the recent piece about McDonald's in the New Yorker.
I have a related question for the audience:

When evaluating a private company what financial data should you ask to see?

I plan to exercise my right as a shareholder (I have previously vested some shares into common stock) to inspect the books and I am interested in knowing the right questions to ask.

Edit: The immediate reason that I'm evaluating the company is to decide whether or not to put in the tax withholding for soon to vest RSUs or to surrender a portion of the shares in lieu.
I think it's the article's point of reference.
Thank you very much for the detailed description.

> or you can take a blank ballot and write it manually

I've been told that in small places in the countryside doing this is tremendously deviant and carries serious covert social consequences.
These locks can be non-trivial to reason about at times. On 9.3 I've been bitten numerous times by concurrent transactions attempting to escalate share locks to exclusive lock because of a FK and getting stuck forever, without the db being able to break up that deadlock. If you intentionally limit the # of connections to the db (which you should), that can lead to downtime. Needed to learn about SELECT FOR UPDATE pretty quickly after that. It seems like that's somewhat ameliorated in 9.4+, although it's still possible in a few corner cases, if I recall correctly from talking to RhodiumToad.
But the noun form of "elide" is "elision", whereas we want the verb for which the noun form is "ellipsis".
It's also terrible when you're traveling outside the first world because food and accommodation are insanely cheap to the point they're almost free.
It varies, usually you have all the papers laid out in a room. You're then free to pick just the ones you'll vote on or you can do like some and take one of each.

Parties will often also send voting blankets in the mail so you can somewhat secretly bring your own papers from home. The only issue there is that some places sets up the voting stands in such a poor way that people almost can see what you're doing anyway.

Another issue that has occurred during the past couple of elections is that the RF/AFA frat boys decided to stand guard at the entrance of some voting places, trying to stop people who intended to vote for SD.
What Scented Candles Say to an Economist
If you read the line carefully, they don't say that they lack an appeals process. They just want to paint the picture that that's the case without saying it.

Note that they say "nearly".

It's odd that they do this in their writing, even though their own style guide advises against it.
Telehouse Docklands has a pretty high level of physical security for the building itself for an urban carrier hotel and especially in both a first world highly safe city and the U.K. specifically.

They had special police with MP5s and stuff after a targeted attack.
Problem is, the much of the same can be said about lawsuits themselves. They also favor the larger party, especially when you factor in court costs.

I do wonder if it would be more fixable by requiring arbitrators to adhere to certain standards and register, then pick one at random for each arbitration request so that no one can stack the deck with their choice of arbiter.
Kudos tk.

I worked on the Symbolics machines as well as the old CADRs as a mere undergrad on the 7th floor, and totally took for granted that I was working on machines ahead of their time. Pretty much spoiled me rotten, and had to seriously adjust when I hit the real world. ;)
It's true that having kids does make everything more complicated, and they provide a reason to stick together. But it isn't stopping parents from divorcing completely, just less than if they didn't have children. And seeing all of those divorced with children, it makes it more difficult, but not difficult enough. For better or for worse, we do it anyway.

Of course, the opposite is also true. When two capable independent adults decide to stick together, there really isn't anything that could keep them apart. Isn't that the beauty of it? This has been at the heart of the western philosophy of marriage.
Thanks! There's no need to convince me of the utility of (La)TeX; I am a mathematician. I just hadn't heard the term "the lion book" before.
Best way to get that kind of thing made illegal is to start putting in Sharia arbitration.
I love Datomic because of the way it removes the need to understand these locks completely. With datomic you can reason far more easily about a set of concurrent updates than dealing with SQL locking levels.

The trade is you are essentially always running with your database as fully serialized writes.
> We always look at Sweden as a very advanced country with the most progressive policies

Sweden and Norway were the undisputed leaders in lobotomies per capita up to the 1970s so not long ago.
1. The changes in the lede of this article --- no more artificial colors, no antibiotics in poultry, emulsifiers with friendlier names --- are marginal. Many of them, like the food colorings, are probably there to satisfy a market demand in the first place (not for the additives, but for the shelf-stable properties they impart on the food) --- if the market would rather have white cheese rather than radioactive orange, why spend the extra 0.5c per package to make them orange? By and large, these aren't "seismic" changes. Marked changes in macronutrient content would be, but that mostly hasn't happened.

Great example: shifts from high-fructose corn syrup to "natural" sweeteners (an almost entirely cosmetic change that puts minimal disruption on the supply chain), or to "gluten free" products.

2. One seemingly enduring and significant change in the food industry is the move away from "liquid calories". Low-fat, Atkins, Paleo, juice cleanse, whatever: regardless of the fad, the conclusion that sweetened soft drinks are practically toxic has probably stuck. "Americans are drinking less soda" makes for a less sexy lede, though.

3. The major shift I see isn't in how people eat, but rather in how the same stuff we've always eaten is marketed to us. Maybe it's gotten easier to handle distribution logistics, or to bring new products to market, but there are a zillion more brands. Where in 1980 we might have had one or two category-killing brands for any given snack, frozen meal, or beverage, we now have 100 different brands --- most of them owned by one of a few major companies.

But again, that's got less to do with "how people eat" and more to do with market segmentation: given a roughly stable COGS for, say, microwaveable frozen dinner entrees, customers today get to choose based on things like loyalty to childhood favorite brands, or "organic" labeling, or "low-carb", or "ancient grains".

Multiply serving size by calories/fats/carbs/proteins/fiber per serving, though, and my guess is that it mostly doesn't matter which one you choose.

4. If that (3) is the case, it doesn't really much matter that consumers are shunning iconic American food brands. They're substituting them for niche brands that are now or soon will be owned by PepsiCo or Kraft.

Any discussion of how Americans buy food they prepare at home probably has to include a discussion of Whole Foods, which has in the last decade gone from a specialty store to one of the largest grocery store chains in the country. But look around at a WFM next time you visit, and notice what percentage of the store is allocated to produce, dairy, and meat, and what percentage is allocated to frozen meals, snacks, and prepared foods. The biggest difference between a WFM and a Safeway isn't the size of the produce section (many "conventional" grocers have bigger produce sections), but rather the size of the prepared foods section, where you can stop in and buy a pizza, a pre-cooked chicken, or a deli of potato salad.
I can't help but reflect that if democracy functioned properly, TPP would never have got this far. When and how do we bring out the pitchforks?

One means of resistance may be cryptographically secured supply chains, wherein consumers may vote with their wallets to embargo bad actors either at the corporate or national level. OK, so that's hard to achieve with physical goods without a significant cost blowout (or even with one), but it could be a strategy. Any others?
Assertion: the rise of arbitration is caused by the rise in the expense and time-to-resolution of the government judicial system.

Thoughts?
It will be interesting to see whether (or when) this will be followed by a decrease in obesity rates.
Sort of like a reverse double jeopardy, huh?