skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usually when people say "first world problem" what they mean is the solution is cheaply affordable by the first world. They aren't talking about the problem at all, they're talking about the solution. The point is non-1st world can't afford the solutions, and they're going to be stuck with this garbage as used appliances and used cars when the 1st world tosses them out in an upgrade. That's the real problem.
Wow, so Uber is even more evil then I thought. They fight for legislation to classify their workers as independent contractors, which then ties those workers' hands in organizing, thereby forcing those workers to accept wages below the minimum wage if they have no other options available.

They're the Silicon Valley equivalent of Walmart.
I can't help feeling domain names are too cheap, just raising the prices a little would wipe out many of the squatters.
Swift String Cheat Sheet
You've managed to miss a few of the biggies I'd count:

- the charset parameter is nowhere near as correct as you'd like it to be
- many RFCs are not followed in practice. In particular, RFC 2047 is literally more often incorrectly implemented than correctly implemented.

I also once recall trying an admittedly weird message (a message whose body is of type message/rfc822) on 4 different IMAP server implementations and getting 4 different answers for part numbering.

I'd say building an email client is harder than building a web browser because at least the people who write the specifications for the latter have been trying to thoroughly document all the idiosyncrasies and how to handle them.

Also, screw CFWS.
> physical books have pages that are easily turned, quick random access to different parts of book, and lots of subtle cues to reader about current location, etc.

Even if that were true, the benefits of a digital reader far far outweigh its drawbacks over its physical counterpart:

1. Digital means, no space required. A library full of books can be easily accommodated on your 64GB MicroSD card!

2. Digital means no wear and tear. History is evidence to the loss of thousands of books and corresponding knowledge due to calamities. With digital, you can backup it to your Google-Drive/Dropbox and they will survive the ages.

3. Digital means no tyranny of authorities. Gone are the days when books used to be "banned" by state authorities for whatever reason. With digital, no one can subvert your freedom to read anything you like.

4. Most importantly, digital means easy sharing. If you have a book in PDF/EPUB, you can just email it, in case you want to share it with someone. With physical books, you have to physically snail-mail it which is quite cumbersome.

A lot of concerns you have made (like page-turning) in fact relate to our age-old habits since we are accustomed to physical books, and like many other things in life, all we have to do is just adapt to this new technology!
the problem with a lot of those tools is that they use email as a notification system. When they should run something more like the notification system for iOS or android. (you have seventeen new notices from jira in 3 issues).

You look at it once, then it is gone and you go to the site to check it out.
As kids, my brother and I always talked about opening a pool hall of novelty tables - varying shapes, terrains, multi-level, obstacles, etc. Bit like mini-golf. Would be so expensive to do though.
> It's just the unintended consequences and manipulation of the move to unionize that are interesting.

Which is caused by the wage levels of Uber drivers to be tantamount to indentured servitude.

EDIT: A very small percentage of Uber drivers are coming out ahead after you account for their time, the wear and tear on their vehicle, and required commercial vehicle insurance (unless they're operating illegally on their own car insurance).
Seems to me you could create an email client that works a little more like Slack but not as ephemeral.
The same reason it's currently illegal for doctors to form a union and set prices.
Not yet but I appreciate the compliment.
His coursera lectures are awesome
Labor law generally outlaws discrimination, spying on, or termination of employees based on union membership.

Seattle seems to be using its authority to regulate transportation services to extend these protections to drivers regardless of whether they are employees or contractors.
That's what it looks like [1]. Every operation is done locally via IndexedDB, and then you manually perform syncs.

[1] https://kintojs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
> or truck drivers

I assume you've never heard of the Teamsters union?
Yep, and the Accummulo store it's built upon was open-sourced by the NSA.
Impressive setup.

I bought my first GPGPU systems from Colfax International. They performed quite admirably. They were advertised as 1U machines, but showed up with vents on the top and bottom of the chassis that could not be covered up, morphing them into 2.5U machines instantly. Ehhh...
How is that a value proposition? You still have to open Office to see your word, excel or ppt docs.

DB simply looks at what Box is doing and puts it on their backlog in JIRA.
1. Nobody is forced to work for Uber.

2. Uber isn't the first company by any stretch of the imagination that employes a workforce of contractors. There is nothing "evil" about that. It's supply and demand. Everyone can drive, so why should Uber pay more wages than they have to? The law will dictate the minimums they can pay.
From your client's perspective, 1) they know you do good work, and want to work with you again, 2) they think you know something about what they do and why they need the software, and 3) they think you know how the software works.

Take the first one as a compliment. It lowers their risk because it's hard to judge the skills of an otherwise unknown consultant.

You probably remember something about their business, even if it is hazy. They therefore aren't going to spend as much time having to get you up to speed on their specific needs. But do let them know that you'll still need some refresher.

And for the last case, you might go ahead and tell them that it's been so long that it's almost like working on someone else's code. (I've reviewed some of my own code a year later, in confusion about what I did, so this is common.) But it's not completely the case. People have idiomatic styles, and it's easier to get up to speed when you share similar idioms to others - which includes yourself.

So on their side, even if you don't remember the code, it's still a plus for them vs. getting someone new to come in completely cold. If you want, price it out as if you were coming in cold to an existing project. Just make sure to let them know that you are happy they like your work, and manage their expectations by reminding them that it's been a while, so it will still take a while to come up to speed.

And in the project, spend a couple of hours writing documentation, or even notes to yourself after the project it done, to make it easier for your future self to get more return work.
Ask HN: I like back end development, and I want to get better
I like large obtuse processes. I making a living using Java, and helping make a process. I 'enjoy' when business wants to take the world me and my coworkers have made and 'change all the rules' (Sometimes this doesn't need to happen other times I do agree that change does need to happen). I'm on my second year post college and still love it as much as my first internship between my freshman and sophomore year.

My weakest area is SQL and I am getting help through a more senior engineer and a DBA (who I occasionally bribe with a Coke for his help). I am continuing my interest in Java, Drools/Fico Blaze (Rules Engines), and I am also learning about Apache2 and Splunk right now and other more enterprise-y technologies. I am continuing being part of conversations with senior engineers and starting to help with driving intent with business and other engineers.

What do y'all think would be some good advice for someone in the early stages in their software life?
This book is an American treasure.
Re: invoking C/C++ from .NET

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288468(v=vs.71).a...
I'll just add this on: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/15411-f14/schedule.html

The lecture notes are simple and excellent, though at a very high level of abstraction. Though most of the notes are full of references to the original material, which is super nice.
I've heard rumor that dead accounts like that can be taken over by someone else by emailing GitHub. A friend of mine did it, but I don't remember all the details of the situation
I have stayed aways from Guns because I thought it was a newsreader, and I have no interest in Usenet. Is it a good email client too?
Advice and Money
Dry erasable markers work fine on white fridges. Don't ask how I know.
Ambiguous use of 'handle' here. For an ambiguous parse, GLR gives a forest of possible alternatives that still has to be disambiguated. Interesting to see a reference to Semantic Designs here, Ira Baxter used to pimp DMS on stack overflow quite a lot, I have not seen anything from them in years, are they still in business?
What part of a "union" can possibly be made illegal in the first place? It seems to me that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are sufficient conditions to implicitly allow freedom of unions, since a union is really just a bunch of people assembling and speaking to each other of their own accord.
This is another of those amazing examples of how the super-cramped (by today's standards) hardware of the late 70's and early 80's inspired some amazing efficiency and brilliant programming. Machines with 1,2,4, 8 or super-enormous 16k memories were standard but still managed to be turned into efficient workhorses for all sorts of uses (pleasure and business).

It's fantastic that many of these stories (and the source code) are starting to be told. I love them for both the memories and finding out how things came about and sometimes even seeing what they caused to evolve through till now.
> Nobody is forced to work for Uber.

Nobody is forced to prostitute themselves, rob or steal, etc. But heh, fuck social safety nets ya know? If they existed, both Walmart and Uber would have to pay real wages.

> Uber isn't the first company by any stretch of the imagination that employes a workforce of contractors. There is nothing "evil" about that. It's supply and demand. Everyone can drive, so why should Uber pay more wages than they have to? The law will dictate the minimums they can pay.

That's right, the law will. Good luck Uber.
Right, you'd need a CPS version of map. Luckily map isn't really a "primitive", it's just a library function, so using a different version of map is not a big deal.

One way to think about it is that languages with callCC built in are just transformed to CPS by the compiler before being run, which includes transforming the definition of map. (In fact, this is a reasonable strategy for compiling Scheme, I believe.)

It's pretty easy in Haskell which wraps CPS into a monad (Cont) because you use mapM from the Control.Monad library instead of having to write a specifically CPSed version of the function.
How would Uber drivers ever be anything other than independent contractors?
>If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place.

I agree that replacing AI with guns makes an interesting point to consider, but is safety a good metric to use? For example, banning alcohol makes the world much safer. And if you prioritize the safety of those who follow the ban over those who don't, things get really disturbing (poisoning alcohol, like the US government did in the past).

A dictator who has a monopoly on weapons/AI can be pretty safe for everyone who falls in line. But it isn't very free.

So perhaps the better question is what increases overall freedom, and I think that having equal AI for everyone is the best approach.
99-page shareholder presentation on why Yahoo needs to fire Marissa Mayer
Every oppressive regime's secret apparatus is basically a large scale database management system. Whether that's with files and folders a la Stasi or with huge data centers in Utah...

Given that, it's not surprising they'd be involved in funding and doing R&D on database systems.
Yahoo investors rankle at spin-off plan, one suggests laying off 9,000
Mindstorms EV3. Hands-down, no question about it.
Broadcast TV? No hardware lock-in, accessible from range of equipment, only update was from B&W to colour.
Nobody is forced to do any of those things, you always have to choose.
IRS classification rules.
A quick Google search says that only 5% of truck drivers are unionized.
Great! We run Firebase in production. Offline-first is one of the most important features for us. (I know, Firebase isn't there yet) I'm surprised this isn't showcased more prominently on their marketing.
EDIT: It appears I was wrong. Original comment:

Uber is by definition a side gig. Nobody is doing Uber on the side in their 1989 LeBaron. You need a nice car, and you can't get a nice car if you only income is from Uber.
Show HN: Speedsums
The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members.
> fridges last years longer than any gadget

You are clearly holding^W using it wrong. You are supposed to buy new fridges way more often, duh...</sarcasm>
It's back I had to restart
Nobody is shocked, quite the opposite. People that work in software have at some point felt that proprietary software almost always makes their life hard (but makes more money). Because of that there are low expectations for the internet of things, because you can bet all the things will be running proprietary software.

This is confirmation of that, and people love confirmation.
> If your organisation needs to rely on 'confidence' to determine who is competent, then by definition it cannot directly discern which employees are competent.

That's correct specifically because in the absence of the ability to judge competence (the original research by Dunning and Kruger showed that those low in competence overestimated the competence of others as well as their own), confidence becomes the stand-in. So over time if you don't start with the most competent people in positions of leadership, and maybe even if you do, you end up with the most confident (and probably least competent) people in them over several refresh cycles.

Longer form piece on the subject: https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-dangers-of-confidence/
Thank you for this comment.
I definitely agree that's the way it should be. I've seen the reality inside a few large corporations and basically nothing would surprise me.
Not that I'm defending the comment you replied to, but your comment is simply untrue. Uber even partners with auto loan companies to provide leases to their drivers. You can absolutely survive 100% on just Uber income. Many do.
Here's one difference: Chat is interactive and email is time-shifted. Users may use them other ways, but those are the fundamental designs.

In fact, I think many problems people have with email boil down to response times. If there was a way to senders could designate how soon they need a response, recipients would be face fewer interuptions and deal with email in batches when it fits their schedule.

Email has the priority field, but so few use it that you can't rely on recipients being aware of it and there are no social conventions about its meaning.
>By definition, insurance will always cost more than than paying out-of-pocket in the long run[0].

This ignores the money saved from group bargaining. It is often not possible to negotiate on price as an individual. A good health insurance company will have more information on pricing than an individual would have and is in a better position to negotiate for the group.
PHACT Phreakers / Hackers / Anarchists / Cyberpunks / Technologists
hi, i would like to introduce my project called PHACT (http://phact.in) meaning Hackers / Anarchists / Cyberpunks / Technologists.
i've read that ycombinator is a seed accelerator,does it help individual projects too?? i have some personal troubles and need some funds to move on,im not sure if this the right place to ask but maybe someone can point me where can i ask?
thx in advance.
Uber operates at global scale, will they just exit seattle market?
A real union is more than just a collection of people getting 'organized'. A real union possesses legal rights to have the government, in effect, control labor rates for a class of services in a certain area. It's a good deal for union members.

OTOH, for consumers seeking less expensive rides, it makes the services more expensive. It also means that workers who are satisfied with offering their services at a lower wage (because it means they have a higher chance of actually finding work) are not allowed to offer their services at that lower wage.
A recent issue of MagPi has an issue about building RPi robots... https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/38/
I want to say "Just because you can make it doesn't mean you can use it irresponsibly", but people will take issue with my use of the words "can't" and "irresponsibly".

There is a subconscious line of reasoning a lot of people in The States (and I assume similar nations) get that goes something like: "If I'm allowed to buy/build this, and I can't see any glaring safety issues, there must not be any."
What percentage of Uber drivers are able to support themselves above the federal poverty line driving for Uber alone?
Firebase does have offline support for iOS/Android[1]. Web support is coming.

[1] https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-o...
FAA to Require Most Drones to Be Registered and Marked
Uber drivers usually have a car loan so their hands are tied and they are convinced to start Uber-ing after being seduced by the 500 dollar signing bonus. At least this is what they mention when we talk about why they still do it if they don't like it. One driver told me he couldn't wait to pay off his loan and go back to being a taxi driver and have time to spend with his family.
Sex is a perfectly legal method of payment
Why not allow the graphics manufacturers to write the OpenGL code like on windows?
I'm not quite sure I understand why you wouldn't want to use an add-on. I can certainly see that the flip side is undesirable. Do you think it makes sense for hacker news to solve this same issue (read it later) when there are many external options to solve the issue? If your answer to this is yes, would you also support adding tweet this story buttons? What about share on Facebook, email me a copy, copy to slack, print to google print, etc. buttons? What about friending users, following them, private messaging? Should hacker news allow images in stories next? If it adds images, then perhaps advertising would be ok?

What are some of the reasons that you read hacker news beyond the particular stories? How do you find the interface? Is it uncluttered? Does it get in the way of the content at all?

In my opinion hacker news is fine as it is, though I mostly hit it via http://hckrnews.com instead of the main site.
Here a Chromebook, There a Chromebook, Everywhere a Chromebook
I think that somewhere deep in some R&D department someone has already been paid for this exact idea and few others of this kind.

Maybe even Intellectual Ventures has a patent on it.
1A: "Congress shall make no law..."[0]

The First Amendment just says that Congress can't do it, not that a private company you're not being forced to work for can't.

To that point, you can be fired for attempting to unionize in certain circumstances. Seattle is just trying to explicitly extend that protection to contractors.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#F...
Get a [TinekerPop3](http://tinkerpop.incubator.apache.org) interface and I'll update my python libs to support it (one day...in the future...when I have time...and interest).
I don't think the dangers need to be downplayed.

The incidence does need to be looked at. I think we blame drones for all sorts of things that are not drones these days.
Pinball machines, but I'd hardly call one-size-fits-all pinball central controllers a harbinger of a brave new world of DIY control board installs. There's significant economic incentive to tinkering with a pinball machine until it works.

Ironically, the all-in-one controllers also tend to be missing some of the more popular pinball machine models, as the IP owners for those machines had the legal muscle to boss around the companies that make the all-in-one boards. As a result, some of the more popular pinball machines are dying as their control boards wear out and they cannot be replaced, because even the popular manufacturers either rotated what they make or went out of business / got bought. :-p
Chinese traditionally had no bound morphemes and even now tends not to. I think dragging a sequence of contiguous characters should be good. Most words are two characters, but some are one, three or four. Many four word characters contain words within them.

This system should work.
I imagine that they wouldn't want to set that precedent. Uber is very aggressive. They will fight this tooth and nail.
Less than 48 hours left on the $15 Humble Bundle 'Learn RPi/Arduino' ebook collection:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books
Read the quote closer. It wasn't just talking about legal responsibility. It was talking about "patriotic duty", "sinister", "public duty", "voluntary", and "morals".

Being mean to your elderly parents conflicts with a few of these ideals.
Safari, please!
There are some legal options here that I'm not qualified to comment on (anti-trust, etc), but I imagine that's what they would do if everything else fails.
Your comment asked if other industries might unionize. I simply pointed out there's an existing union for truck drivers, not its membership level.
Virtually free – JVM callsite optimization by example
OpenAI: Some thoughts, mostly questions
One of my favorite blogs without a doubt, been reading your onboards since the beginning.
http://gparted.org/liveusb.php gparted on a USB stick.

It has a really nice gui.

if that fails(NTFS can be an arse), dd of=/dev/source of=/dev/destination bs=8M(or m) (use the device not the partition, that way pain lies) which will bit copy all the things.

then use windows to resize the partition. (but only if gparted fails.)
Eh -- "secure-ish" at best. Spending those utxo's requires revealing the pubkey, at which point someone with a quantum computer can just break your pubkey and offer a new transaction with a higher fee while your transaction is still in the mempool.
> Note I'm not opposed to people's freedom to unionize. In fact, it should not take an act of government to "permit it", and people should do it if they want.

Everyone has the right to organize a voluntary union. What requires special legislated privilege are things like collective bargaining, which is not a normal component or outcome of voluntary negotiations.

Modern unions in the United States enjoy many legal privileges that were specifically lobbied for. It's this type of privileged union which is being argued for, not a mere voluntary association under an impartial legal regime.
You mean hiring echo chambers is an essential thing?

Considering the vast majority of startups fail, maybe this is
one aspect that needs rethinking.