skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>still means $15/hour W2 is not directly comparable to $15/hour 1099

of course not that is why contractors get paid more than salary employees. If contractors dont ask for more money per hour then its their own fault.
Even more scary for Detroit, once the American public figures out Tesla is actually more American made than the big 3 they will feel no guilt in buying Teslas instead. This is especially the case if we start losing a bunch of coastal areas and the big 3 look apathetic about their role in global climate change.
> But that's not necessarily a bad thing!

hmm, i have a diametrically opposite opinion about it. languages (successful ones at least) are designed to solve a problem, not prove a point :)

for example, lisp, c etc. all came into being because the designers found nothing which would help them do whatever they were doing e.g. for lisp, describe an abstract notion of computation, and for 'c' write fairly low level code without dropping down to assembly etc.

if teaching 'language theory' etc. is the end goal of a language, and it's not an unworthy goal at all, probably more 'syntax free' languages e.g. oberon, scheme, lisp etc. might be better ?

[successful languages: imho, are the ones that have just stood the canonical 'test of time' and i would include only 3 here: fortran (blaspheme!), lisp and C]
I don't think they will win. Every single uber driver I talk to loves it. They love that they can work whenever they want, that they can choose to work for Lyft or uber, etc. I don't know how you can say they are anything like an employee. There is no negative consequences for not working except less money.
Works well, but I cannot figure out to browse the likes of follwers and followees, which is one of my main ways of discovery. So back to the website.
The way that inappropriate laws get fixed in the US is that new laws get passed, not that people violate the laws that seem irrelevant to them. I have no objection to Uber lobbying for laws to introduce a new class of employees (and I have absolutely no objection to Uber or anyone else making life hard for the taxi lobby). I do have a strong objection to Uber deciding to treat employees in a way prohibited by law because they, on their own, think it makes more sense.

"Legislative gridlock" is a weak excuse. Plenty of legislation gets through, from PPACA (which had, and continues to have, widespread objection) to USA FREEDOM (even if you claim PATRIOT's expiration was the result of "deadlock", the replacement came a day later) to JOBS (specifically legalizing things that startups wanted to do!) to allowing people to unlock their cell phones (not really a Big Foo priority). If the people really want Uber and Airbnb -- which they seem to -- why can't they just get a law passed? And why can't all these innovative, well-funded startups figure out how to disrupt and fix something as obviously dysfunctional as our political system?

My worry is not so much with these particular ways they're breaking the law; it seems like this is probably reasonable (though I'd still like someone other than Uber to consider it). My worry is with the loss of the rule of law, and the precedent that we're not going to care about whether the law is followed. It's certainly true that Uber et al. aren't the first companies to break laws, but this seems like a qualitative change in what laws are being broken and what the impact on society is, and a democratic society should be able to have an opinion on it.
> I don't think they will win. Every single uber driver I talk to loves it.

That's not quite how the law works. Whether you enjoy being subjugated or not doesn't effect if the law can be enforced against the entity violating the law.
Thanks for the link. Very helpful.
They're also percentages with no actual absolute numbers. People often interpret percentages while falsely assuming that other things remain constant. For example, if condom use is accepted and people come to believe condoms work, they may be more likely to have sex more frequently because their fear of contracting STDs and pregnancy have decreased. This means that the failure rate no longer pertains to the original frequency of sexual intercourse but the new one. This way, the number of actual failures (vs. just the rate) may exceed the original, and with it the number of abortions. This way, condoms actually enable the behavior whose consequences they were intended to limit. Yay, big picture.
Meanwhile, you manage to secure venture-capital funding and even a bank loan. The interest rate is high, but with your rapid growth, you should be able to pay it back.

Meanwhile, in the Japan some of us actually live in:

1) Very few 26 year olds will be successfully able to convince their 26 year old co-workers to leave Sharp, because that is a once-in-a-lifetime mistake. I am literally related to a $ANONYMOUS_FOR_SAKE_OF_RELATIVE employee who is presently miserable and cannot leave because that means an end of economic stability for his family forever and his family makes no secret of how unhappy they would be in that situation.

2) If you are a 26 year old startup founder and you ask for a bank loan ^H^H^H^H business checking account, be prepared to get told "Oh hell no.", but very politely. The first variant of "Oh hell no" is "Hmm, well theoretically speaking we do have business checking accounts available as a product. Can we see your articles of incorporation, business plans, office rental contract, orders from customers, etc etc?" Upon which you say "Well we're making LCDs so we don't have orders yet because we need a bank account to e.g. purchase machinery" at which point "We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your business."

Not a theoretical concern: I'm presently 2 weeks into the fun with a large Japanese bank trying to get an account issued, which shakes fist at a personal bugbear is not exactly the easiest thing to accomplish for a Western tech entrepreneur in Tokyo at the moment. (I've been asked about Bitcoin three times already.) If I manage to get the account, it will because I rounded up 123 pages of documentation (not an exaggeration, that's a count) from previous work to convince the bank that I was not a ML nor fraud nor credit risk.

3) Venture capital: you will not successfully receive sufficient-to-create-a-physical-product venture capital as a 26 year old in Japan. It's difficult to raise what would be "trivial by Valley standards" just to build software products: prepare for 6 months of All The Fundraising Fun You Can Imagine to get an A round sized like a modest seed round in St. Louis. You need substantial industry connections here to convince a corporate VC to give you the corporation's money. The high-percentage way to "compete" with Sharp is to spend 30 years in it, get recognized internally as a very competent performer who is not management track, "quit" to "run a startup" which makes a product that Sharp definitely needs but would have difficulty making without you, receive money from Sharp's affiliated VC vehicles, and "exit" by taking the buyout order from your single customer, which will naturally be Sharp.

("What would incentivize Sharp to do that?" Because all salarymen at Sharp of a given age are equal but some are more equal than others. M&A is allowed to make decisions regarding compensation that HR is not. This incentivizes folks who are internally indispensable but not managers who show up in the Nikkei/WSJ by name to do a bit of revolving-door. Think like Google but amped to 11.)
internally Apple calls it “Map Matching”; I call it “Snap to Road”.

I've noticed that Apple tends to give things vague-sounding names, and it's probably not by accident. I mean if my GPS had an option named "Snap to Road", I'd immediately understand its function. If it was called "Map Matching", I would be a bit perplexed.

To me, this feature seems like a horrible workaround for poor GPS accuracy, and doing it at the API level is just wrong. If an app reads coordinates from the GPS it should get the most accurate location possible (some concession could be made for pseudo-anonymising randomisation as a security/privacy option). If they feel the need to do some sort of "smoothing" on the data, then it must be an opt-in option, not obligatory.
It's 800 tweets (per https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/home_tim...), and it sucks if you're one of those who want to read every single tweet posted while sleeping.
My only problem with "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" was that it probably should have been an amazing 45 minute film, but he stretched it to twice that to make it into a feature. By the end, what was initially magical felt diminished by repetition.

In contrast, when I visited Grotte de Niaux [1], we were allowed only a brief moment to see the cave paintings to keep the cave temperature constant. That limited time was truly special.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Niaux
Can you show me how "independent contractor" Uber employees can ask more per hour?
Be great if you could order artists by number of friends/followers who like them...
Uber is the world's most highly valued private company? Somebody better tell Saudi Aramco.
Intellectual curiosity, and a desire to experiment with new languages to be more productive/write cleaner code.
I wonder how this compares with whatever fashion photographers charge? What a narcissistic way to spend $150k.
I'd love to see some more details about this work, in a form like the OP's blog. Simulation results hold a big appeal to the HN crowd and I think you'd find a good audience for them.
I think it wasn't just about mindshare. It's easy enough to emulate gopher with a website: it's just a list of links: <ol> and <a> to the rescue.

I still remember the lab where someone first showed me Mosaic. I was familiar with the Internet: FTP, Usenet, xtank, archie. I said, 'what's that?' He said, 'it's the World Wide Web!' I asked, 'what's that?' and he replied, 'it's like the Internet, but even bigger!'

That was all it took.
The Great Filter theory suggests humans have conquered the threat of extinction
Ask HN: Linode equivalent of Dedicated Server?
I've been using Linode/Digital Ocean for most of my side projects and I'm quite happy with their service. For one CPU intensive project, I need a dedicated server. What do you recommend ? I'm looking for a reliable dedicated server with lots of CPU power and no-downtime issue.
I've been playing with Elixir on the side and have picked Elixir as my singular choice to migrate to after (or alongside) Python. Elixir/Phoenix looks like a true "upgrade" and I really hope someday I'm in a position at a company to initiate its adoption.

Unlike so many other newer technologies, even a new language like Elixir running on BEAM bytecode is technically more mature than Node or Go. I could make a very strong business case to adopt it within any organization.

And probably even end up making JVM based tech look like some sort of new upstart project.
People will forever be the weakest link in a system's security.
... and there's no chance the space-faring superpowers don't already have their own map data of China, in their own coordinate schemas, with their own annotations for military purposes.

After all, launching all those mapping satellites was expensive. They did it for some reason. ;)
Changes in Climate Have Always Made Things Worse for Accused Witches
And it's curious to see this in Apple maps. When I travelled to China, I generally found Apple maps to be superior to Google maps, and it works without a VPN. But as soon as I left China, the Apple map data for much of the Chinese regions simply became garbage. Even major cities are shown as empty areas without features.

EDIT: grammar
Just because the government-- which has spent $8T over the past several years -- spends some money on "technology", mostly aimed at better killing people overseas, does not mean that the government is the reason that we have iPads, etc. SpaceX in fact, shows how inefficient it is-- instead of spending $1B (at least) per launch of the "reusable" space shuttle, SpaceX is able to put things in orbit an order of magnitude cheaper.

If a thief steals your car and gives you a bicycle, should you thank the theif for giving you the gift of transportation, or recognize that you would have been better off in the first place if you could have kept the car?

This is the problem with all these "government made the internet" type claims-- they ignore that the government spends orders of magnitude more, and produces remarkably little ($8T during the Obama presidency, for instance. The entire national debt accumulated to the Reagan era-- widely criticized for his profligate spending-- was only $4T.)
If she does win the case then wouldn't Uber and Lyft simply give less of a percentage of earnings per ride to their drivers to compensate for the change of cost? Would Uber and Lyft make more if they had their drivers on a similar model to a pizza delivery driver ($4.50/h + tips)?
according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matching) SNOBOL in '62
> The only reason developers are employees is because contract developers are more expensive than employees who don't realize sodas aren't actually that expensive for adults with real skills.

Uh, no. Being an employee has a lot of rights that a 1099 person doesn't have, like the right to unionize, the ability to collect unemployment insurance if the company you're working for goes under, being a part of a health insurance pool for lower medical costs, access to the Family and Medical Leave Act rights, etc. There are a lot of things that employees get that aren't just "free sodas".
You're absolutely right about the majority. If someone is capable enough to understand customer needs and resolve issues outside of predefined scripts they are capable enough to be working beyond customer support. Customer support representatives are largely people who exist as an interface between a customer who doesn't understand a system and a system that doesn't understand the customer needs.

Most companies would do well to invest in "Customer Support Engineer" type roles, putting people who understand systems and are informed problem solvers on the front lines, people who can identify technical solutions to customer problems. Customer Support Representatives problem solving seems to begin and end with what they've learned from the latest ZenDesk Webinar. Most companies seem to believe that fast and friendly messages are what customers want, through twitter and Facebook, when the reality is they want their problem solved and the business most benefits when the cause is identified and solved for all customers, not the symptoms for one customer.

Most companies could slice their customer support costs in half and increase their customer satisfaction substantially if they invested in building out roles for problem solvers instead of ticket solvers. 1 ticket solved is 1 ticket solved. A problem solved can be hundreds or thousands of future tickets prevented and an improved customer experience.

(This comment isn't a slight against customer service representatives, they serve an important purpose at many companies and often provide great value. This comment is a slight against the companies that choose to hire a dozen more customer support representatives instead of addressing the core issues that are driving people to their support.)
Looks like that uses Clang/LLVM. Does it work with C++ libraries built with GCC or MSVC?
accidentally downvoted you sorry!
> Note, though, that catch-all emails will also catch a ridiculous amount of spam

Hasn't been a problem for me.
I can't believe developers are falling into the Soylent marketing trap! Oversimplification is the root of all (nutritional) evil! If want something based on real food, at least do something like Ambronite [0] instead!

[0] http://ambronite.com/
> Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations.

That kind of sums up the current bubble, doesn't it?
The original paper has this quote: "But cocaine makes the housekeeper throw away really important things, like mitochondria, which produce energy for the cell."

- http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/jhm-nei011316...

I think that most stimulant users are emotionally disturbed. Cocaine users tend to be depressed, amphetamine users tend to be angry, but while 'high' they get to feel good (or 'normal'), at least for a while.
It's even more insidious than that. Some people in positions of power are compelled to imitate socially-acceptable behavior as defined by popular media to the point where it requires active resistance to oppose the act of torture. See for example "Normative Social Influence"[1] and "Moral Conviction and Resistance to Social Influence" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_social_influence
[2] https://www.uic.edu/labs/skitka/public_html/OppTorture.pdf
I did the same with Perl in 10 minutes: https://git.io/vzKDs

it was fun I will check it tomorrow when I'm back from the pub
Ambronite – Food for a Modern Lifestyle
Except that the state doesn't take any sort of a long term view, unless you consider the next election a "long term". The state can't do anything to benefit the economy- by definition all the money spent by the state was taken via taxation or inflation, in both cases taken out of the private economy exactly at the point where they would otherwise be invested in economic growth... and the state is notoriously terrible at allocating that money (most of which is spent bombing people, or preparing to bomb people.)
SoundCloud Will Be Worth More Than Spotify
That's somewhat ironic, considering Strava does their own form of 'snap-to-track' normalisation on GPS data. They have to, in order to do leaderboards on segments, at a guess, but still...
Please address the central point rather that seizing on an ambiguity in my post.

That point being, that sexual activity in the armed forces is still controlled and sometimes that drive cannot be satisfied for relatively long periods, and this is commonly accepted.
> The original statement is true, the incorrect belief about how contraceptives work merely explains why.

No, because they are fine with contraceptives which they don't believe are abortaficients. A contraceptive prevents conception (hence the name); other drugs, devices or procedures end lives (whether by preventing implantation or directly killing the fœtus). I think that several of the things they believe are abortaficients aren't, and that there's decent science behind that, but I also can't blame them for not trusting folks who don't apparently care about the distinction between something which prevents contraception and something which prevents implantation.

I also don't think that an employer should be made to pay for the health care of employees in general. I eat more than I ought; my health is worse than it should be. Who should foot that bill which results from my choices: my employer or myself?
And now that this is public, we're all at more risk.
>The way that inappropriate laws get fixed in the US is that new laws get passed,

Fixed a lot of inappropriate laws, have you?
I'd recommend gandi.net; among many other reasons, they don't charge for whois privacy, though you still have to turn it on.
How are drivers being subjugated and what law is being violated. What evidence is there that they are actually employees besides the fact that lawyers and union activists want them to be?
This is also important to remember; most customer service organizations exemplify micro-management, with a whole layer of people who make it their job to prevent the reps from helping customers by gaming useless metrics.

Having a flat customer service organization (and valuing making customers happy) sounds like a great way to filter for reps who can think independently and find ways to make customers happy (and themselves more efficient).
It could save on battery power: If the user has been on the road, we can ping the GPS less often on the assumption they'll be mostly moving along one of a set of known paths.

It could compensate for poor GPS availability, by allowing the track generator to make more informed guesses about where the user has been, if a GPS ping happens to get dropped.
> If she does win the case then wouldn't Uber and Lyft simply give less of a percentage of earnings per ride to their drivers to compensate for the change of cost?

Uber and Lyft would need to pay hourly wages, along with all of the associated taxes due.

> Would Uber and Lyft make more if they had their drivers on a similar model to a pizza delivery driver ($4.50/h + tips)?

Uber and Lyft's entire business model is built on the independent contractor model. I don't believe they could reach profitability in any scenario with human drivers if they have to pay them as stipulated by IRS regulations.
I thought Erlang looked weirder than Elixir (to the extent that I was turned off until Elixir came along), but fortunately, both of our opinions are compatible as everything compiles down to BEAM and is interoperable :)

From a semantic persopective I've found that I almost automatically understand Erlang just from working with Elixir. Some things like OTP are pretty much identical. Plus you get "real" macros :)
Simple in the sense that there should be a small number of basic
principles, if these are right then the language will be powerful but easy
to comprehend and use. Small is good. This we managed to do. - this is what packer's mindset would never understand. Nature doesn't work the way they think Java should.

This, by the way, is the universal principle. As simple as possible, but right. People who studied viruses and molecular biology in general would understand.

The protein expression/DNA repair machinery is where one should look for insights. That world is everything-is-a-firstclass, pure-functional, strongly but dynamically typed (everything has its unique structure, which could be used as a type-tag) and even duck-typed (if something binds to a receptor it triggers an action), loosely coupled, asynchronous, timeless.

It should be easy to model cells and even organs in Erlang because it has been based on the right smallest possible set of basic principles, or, at least, close to it.

MIT Scheme sub-culture also has great insights about putting the right principles first. So were Smalltalk or Plan9 guys.
It's well known that companies quickly turn south around bad manager, if just because they can't retain good talent. But that doesn't make all managers bad: Good ones are rare, and their people know it.

For instance, I just left a well paying job at a very large company because my manager quit: he though no initiative could never be successful in the internal political climate, so he left despite being offered a big promotion. Since he left, the company had 6 high profile resignations, as we all knew the alternatives the head of IT was considering were just bad managers. Now, with tentpole technical people leaving, a lot of other qualified people are looking for new jobs too: It was quality leadership that was bringing the team together.

Really, your original comment on this topic would be 100% fair if you were describing what this company is going to end up with. I have worked for horrible, horrible managers over the years. It's just that once you have seen good management, and understand the wonders of productivity one of those can achieve, it's just very hard to agree with a view quite as dire as yours.

There's all this companies that are working on helping recruit good developers: In my experience, good developers are not really THAT hard to find: But a company that could help hire good managers, and properly identify the people that have management qualities in our office, as opposed to just those that look and sound managerial? Now that's a company that would be worth hiring.
Except if it's an optimisation for battery life. Theoretically, you could use less power by pinging the GPS less often in 'snap to road' mode - if that's the case, the 'real' data wouldn't exist or wouldn't be accurate.