skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming.

And some people with the talent to code don't have the physiology to last long doing manual labor.
This is wrong. Cryptocurrencies can be freely exchanged with anyone, anywhere unlike Cash which is only censorship-resistant for the transactions done in person. Cryptocurrencies are more distributed in the sense that exchange rates are set by market not central banks. This means cryptocurrencies can have more permanent stability than cash. Though at the moment none of the cryptocurrencies do. But as the adoption increases so will stability.
> ...whereas today's campaigns seem to draw more on personality than principle.

I disagree. There are lots of principles at stake. The open Supreme Court seat, for instance, is entirely a substantive issue. And almost everyone agrees it's one of (if not the) most important issue. But what is there to debate in 30 second soundbytes?

What's missing is substantive debate on our principles. In the absence of actual debate, the media covers political contests as if they were horse races or sporting events. So it looks like people vote on personality, not issues. But what, I think, people are looking for is trust that the official will break their way when the chips are down, political pressure is on, and messy facts are laid out.

In that way, the controversy over Douglas isn't that foreign, really. Voters who like Trump seem to think he's head-and-shoulders over the other candidates on certain issues (immigration being an obvious one).
The hidden price Steph Curry pays for making the impossible seem effortless
There's always been more than one.
> However, efficiency can also ultimately mean a society where people no longer have to work at all

Indeed, that is an interesting concept, but at this point in time that goal is still far off and somewhat utopic, and so the question is whether there is only one path towards that goal (assuming it is achievable, desirable, or even if it is inevitable), and what and who we choose to sacrifice in the meantime.
Either - it's a massive added convenience, but in a corporate security setting an attacker invisibly having remote access to screen, input devices, and data is a security nightmare, and a single compromise can grant access to the entire fleet.
I should have said "you're acting like a clown." But I like the idea of having you realize that making a statement such as "enslaved" in regards to a secretary merely doing the job assigned to her (and is free to quit doing so at any time) is silly. To expound upon that Knuth is arrogant is even funnier. These two individuals are engaged in innocent, free-willed jobs and you come in like the moral chief of police saying the secretary is enslaved and that Knuth is arrogant. This is why I say "get over yourself" and do still mean it.

Regardless, I appreciate your response.

> In my point of view, the main problem is that there are very deep social problems within our setting and most people doesn't even want to see it

Sure, but a secretary doing her job is not one of them.

> They seem to prefer staying in their comfort zones, doing what they do so far as they have learned growing up while going along the flow.

> I think it's much better for people to express what they actually think than to censor them behind big man's words or else communication becomes impossible.

Both true statements. You might have good intentions, but I would think twice before calling something like Knuth arrogant and ask yourself, who's the arrogant one? Who's the one dictating how people should live? Is it Knuth, who is merely living in a way who thinks it'll best optimize his educational findings or is it you, who is judging the situation as if you know what they both want and what's good for them?
Ask HN: How do you find mentors?
To give some background I am a young co-founder in a VC backed company that spun out of academia.

We have been around for about 2 years and are currently going what might be termed as a pivot (although not that drastic). We are experiencing some pressure to downsize and "restructure" from our board.

I would love to talk with someone who has been in a similar situation. One of my VCs has put me in contact with a mentor but I feel like this person really has my VC's best interest in mind.

So my question is, how do I go about finding a trustworthy, impartial mentor?
Uber has a monopsony on Uber drivers in the same way that Apple has a monopoly on selling Apple devices, which is to say, not for any useful definition of the term. Plenty of Uber drivers also drive for e.g. Lyft.
I look at articles like these as raising awareness - not fear.
But if you take your center of activity away from FB and participate in other online communities, then in a way FB has lost, even if you maintain a token presence. You can enjoy different forms of social networking.
With people who are intrinsically motivated to do a good job. Craftspeople take pride in their work, because doing it well feels better than doing it poorly.

They'll voluntarily make their own jobs more difficult if it makes the project better, even in ways that only others skilled in their craft would notice. They'll actually fight management for more hours, more money, better tools, different processes, etc. so they can get it right. Management's role isn't to force them to do their jobs, but to restrain them from going overboard.

Of course, this requires that they feel respected, sufficiently autonomous, and compensated fairly. And that they like what they're doing, at least a little bit. You get this routinely from theater professionals. Warehouse stock pickers, not so much.

Quantitative metrics and "goals" are a form of coercion that management deploys against its enemies to extract performance from people who fundamentally don't want to do a good job. In this kind of situation, we've taken to threatening to cut off their access to food and medicine and send armed men to seize their homes and cars (no, the layer of indirection between employers and lenders doesn't really matter). People like to eat, so they play along. And in rote jobs that only exist because they aren't cost-effective to automate yet, maybe that's the only way to do it.

You're not guaranteed a work environment where craftsmen are intrinsically motivated just by foregoing metrics, but as soon as your introduce "goals" (i.e. threats) a good chunk of people who would otherwise be on your side have instantly switched to searching for the minimum effort they can get away with until their either retire or find job that respects them.

Even if people still somehow feel respected, hitting/optimizing the metrics probably means doing the job sub-optimally, and that takes its toll - even if you personally decide not to play the wrongheaded metrics game, others in the organization will, and that creates conflicts (that you usually lose) where there should have been cooperation.

The Wire is essentially a show about this, and how it creates institutional dysfunction that breaks cities. "The fury of a bureaucrat who wants to do their job but can't because they've been fucked over."
> This strikes me as a particularly good first userbase. In my experience working at Counsyl, new parents are eager to do everything available to ensure their child is healthy. It's a great way to enter the healthcare market since there's lots of money and openness to new ideas.

Great data point, thanks for that :)

> What do you need to do to succeed? Do you need to build a network of doctors? Will that require a large sales staff (typical of healthcare related companies)?

We need to be able to book timely and convenient appointments for patients with their doctors, but we won’t need a network of doctors or a large sales staff. While integration with physician calendars would be ideal, we can get around this by “doing things that don’t scale” ;). If we only have access to patient calendars and their doctor’s contact info, we can still ensure appointments are made by calling their doctors ourselves. This opens more doors to us, and solves a serious chicken and egg problem: a patient whose doctor isn’t online would see little use for our app, and we’ve spoken with clinics who still use paper calendars! Added benefit: patients are also identifying doctors of interest for our sales team, which we believe is better than the shotgun approach of trying to convert random clinics.

> How are you going to use technology better than competitors? Does zocdoc do something similar?

Our competitors (ex. ZocDoc) require patients to request the appointment, for preventive care or otherwise. Patients aren’t doing that now (unless sick!), and we don’t think they’ll start doing it out of the blue.

>Does your service actually schedule the appointment on their behalf, and the user just needs to be somewhere at a particular time? If so, do you know that people will actually be receptive to that or will they feel like it's an invasion into their personal time?

Yes, we actually schedule the appointment. We believe that patients are more likely to follow through with their appointments if the time is convenient, the reason is justified, and there is zero booking related friction. We don’t think people will see this as an invasion of their personal time; if they signed up for this and we explain it clearly, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when we suggest a check-up. Since the number of preventive care appointments have a maximum cadence of about 1 per month (in the case of expecting parents), the user will not be overwhelmed with notifications, and we’ll make it easy to cancel appointments at the click of a button.

> How will you make money?

We have a couple thoughts we are exploring. One is a transaction model based on attended appointments, or a SaaS model with a subscription fee.

Aside: per https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits..., “Most health plans must cover a set of preventive services at no cost...”, so patients will incur little to no financial burden for attending these appointments.
I've experimented with lots of digital note-taking styles: mindmaps from open source to paid, notebooks like evernote, bookmarking systems, PPT flashcards...but none can really replace writing notes with hand. Its a lot faster, no accidental clicks, and drawing and annotating specific things are a non-brainer. When I got a highly sensitve tablet to actually write things in it, it still felt clumsy. I have to take pictures then import them into my notebook app, I have to switch pen colours and nib width, and then there's the ironic trouble of not being able to find a specific information I want, unless i do sophisticated tagging but that's also too much effort. And oh boy the panic that came with the battery running out halfway through a lecture.

Back to pen and paper for me, and loads of post-its for bookmarks.
The military did use the shuttle but maybe not in the way you think: they didn't have a separate military only shuttle, but the shuttle was used to launch many very large military satellites into orbit.
Mounting data suggest antibacterial soaps do more harm than good
I can't be excited for both because what BO is doing isn't very interesting.

I suspect BO is working bottom-up for where SpaceX is right now. But they are going to start with reusability from the get-go.
That and a little extra fuel. But, as you say probably less weight than you might think. Also, getting dunked in water probably adds quite a bit of new stresses so you would need a stronger rocket shell which is more wight.
Socialism is another of those words. If you say, "that country is socialist" no one has any idea what you're talking about, you have to explain it. So better to use a different word in the first place.
> You choose majors in college that make you more money

I wonder how many poor kids ever have the opportunity to choose a major in college?
Actually, you could manufacture ethane out of the martian atmosphere, and it could be burned in an internal combustion engine using the CO2 atmosphere as oxidizer.
Because health agencies pour tons of work and money into preventing their spread before the next major disease can hit us.

Or would you rather a modern Spanish flu pandemic kill half a billion people?
Many of them are still free, but not the specialisation courses I know.
Ask HN: How to find people to cold email for my SaaS?
Hi HN,

I have an idea for a small SaaS business.

I'd like to follow the "lean startup" approach: find customers first and then build the product. So I plan to cold email a few companies to get their thoughts on my idea.

My target customers are small companies in my city, that have a website, and that are currently hiring.

However I have no idea where to find the emails of my potential customers. I'm willing to do some scrapping, but where?

Do you have any advice to share on this? Thanks!
This would be an arms race between truck companies and looters, with companies leveling up in security on their trucks.

But in this case I am not sure the problem is so different than with a human driver. I can't imagine a employee risking to get beaten up/shot just to save the cargo from a group of robbers for instance.
The last mile is where automated trucks are least likely to work, though. They have to deal with local streets, pedistrians, cyclists, poor roads, unmarked roads, all the things that are most difficult for automated vehicles.
YourMechanic (YC W12) Looking for a Director Of Ops, Data Scientists, Engineers
Llandudno, wales, photography
Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out.

That's true, because if mismanagement caused a city to collapse, then San Francisco would be a ghost town by now. There are stinky things in city hall.
> There's tons of poor and working class people that think they'll get rich with music or something

Maybe a major difference is that if you try that path and you are poor, you're out of options. If you try it and you are wealthy, then you change majors in college.
The mystery of HN front page... a 2011 article from the Guardian about a known topic not related to technology.
Is it worth paying for the streaming rights to a TV program you can watch for free OTA? Is it worth paying fraternity dues when you could just have a party with friends?

As a hobby I'd say its pretty cheap per hour. I've paid for some of the data science classes.
The central premise of the article is faulty: That Democratic policies (or "Innovation Liberalism") created the divide between the wealthy and the working class in Massachusetts, when in fact it has always been the opposite: The divide was already there, and the party in power serves to maintain it while playing lip service to some ideals.
Those are just targeting the 0.1% though. The average $250,000/year earner isn't buying any of that except for maybe "luxury goods", however you define those.

I don't see any tenable path towards implementing this kind of taxation scheme. Consumer spending is the driving force of the US economy, and higher taxes on spending would cause serious reductions in spending in favor of saving (which goes untaxed). So you'd see huge collapses in goods and services industries, with people putting off big purchases until after the inevitable collapse of the new taxation scheme. Meanwhile entire companies are dying and millions becoming unemployed.

My effective total taxation rate under your proposed scheme would go from ~45% to under 10%. I save most of my income, and housing is more than half of the money I do save. I don't live in luxury housing or anything, and since you're discounting income, you thus couldn't charge me any more in taxes on my housing than my neighbors who earn significantly less (and couldn't afford to pay huge taxes on expensive housing).
>just suggesting a sensible mosquito abatement strategy

Sensibly suggesting it with the foreboding headline "Zika Is Coming"?

And, this, in the context of the fear that is already being ginned up about the virus.

I don't know that it's a conspiracy, but it's pretty predictable by now: "This New Virus Will Kill Us All" headlines. Story after story, then the fizzle when fears prove to be overstated.

So, just as suddenly, the headlines completely disappear. Ebola headlines stopped literally overnight from just about every media outlet.

But, within a few months another mortal fear arises. You can set your watch to it.
Maybe it wasn't the wisest idea for the state to fund an Interstate Highways System and all it's associated infrastructure 50+ years ago. I've always wondered what the U.S. would look like had we not taken that route. I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious. Who knows, maybe we'd be taking cross-country trips in hyperloops instead of automobiles?
مشاهدة فيلم من ضهر راجل كامل
Look for something in the apache incubator and try to contribute something to that.
Yup. There's plenty of people who want to continue to believe in our broken meritocracy, that the (bowdlerized) Alger bootstraps tales are possible for everyone. They aren't.

There are enormous numbers of people who work very hard and get nowhere. The elements of the "Character Hypothesis" (persistence, determination, self-control / the ability to delay gratification, abstention from substance use, curiosity,
conscientiousness, self-confidence, emotional intelligence,
good communication skills, a willingness to listen, and grit) are all necessary to escape poverty, but not anywhere sufficient. Pure chance is a huge factor, but acknowledging that fact destroys the entire project in some minds.

There's a reason the Nordics have so much higher social mobility than the US does. They actually work at it:

"In addition to other correlations with negative social outcomes for societies having high inequality, they found a relationship between high social inequality and low social mobility. Of the eight countries studied — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA, the USA had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility. In this and other studies, in fact, the USA has very low mobility at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with mobility increasing slightly as one goes up the ladder. At the top rung of the ladder, however, mobility again decreases.[10]

One study comparing social mobility between developed countries[11][12][13] found that the four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?
(Indenting text on HN is usually not a good idea -- it puts the text in a monospace font and turns off line wrapping. You might want to fix the formatting.)

Cute idea! Not sure about the monetization part. But get popular first, as they say, and you can figure out the money later.
> Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. [...] Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities --- an Amazon warehouse that is now in the planning stages -- will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.

Let me get this straight. The elite are bad for taking away working class jobs in industrial sectors (jobs which could be so brutal to workers that they basically spurred the invention of the labor unions). But they are also bad when they create new working class jobs.

There is definitely a problem for working class people today. Maybe it feels better for people to believe that it's because today's politicians and business leaders are uniquely malfeasant. But it's not really accurate. Technology changes the picture and we have to figure out how to respond to that. Read about the Ludlow Massacre and try and tell me that industrial America was "the good old days."
The story of Morphy dying surrounded by women's shoes is apocryphal.
I suggest to read more about Shake before dismissing it. The paper is short and easy to follow. Shake solves real world problems that go ignored in other systems. If needed, one could add a simple mode via an EDSL, but so far nobody using Shake has requested such a things from what I can tell, but Neil would be better equipped to answer that. I haven't written a single Shakefile with unicode, and no you don't have to, but apparently you can, if you prefer to.

As a start I'd suggest to read "Shake before building".
Be Careful When Using Scoped Structures in C
You're right, reuse didn't work out with the Shuttle nearly the way they wanted it to. But it did work out to some degree, while Buran's version of it never went beyond paper.
It's either DDT or Ospreys. One comes with micro-cephalic children. The other dooms an endangered species to extinction.

Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
It's complex because there are job creators, and there are bankers and investors who create value in the country, and generally make the world a better place.

At the same time, there are also corrupt thieves wearing corporate clothes, who destroy companies and sell them off in pieces; there are bankers who lie and cheat and buy laws to make them money; there are senators who use insider information on the stock market, or connections in other ways to make money.

So how to keep the good while getting rid of the bad? That is the central question.
This guy isn't saying that Zika will kill us all. The headline you're complaining about simply states that Zika is coming. Are you claiming that Zika isn't coming?

Ebola didn't disappear on its own. It was sound containment policy that kept it from gaining a foothold in developed countries. Exactly the kind of sound policy that the author is advocating.

Your line of thinking is what makes measles come back.
I don't really understand why people become so anti-email. I'm a deeply introverted person, so it's not like I don't understand wanting to be left alone, but if I don't want to be interrupted... I close my email viewer. The asynchronous nature of email makes it great for introverted people. I used to get a TON of email at one of my prior jobs, and, like, it was fine. Just wait till it's convenient to open it. If it's actually urgent they'll call or send an IM.

I'm not accusing Knuth of this, but I think some people just use email as a way of humble-bragging. "I'm so important it's overwhelming!" Yeah wow. We're all so impressed.
After catching dust for 15 years on my bookshelf, I sold the 3-volume edition of The Art of Computer Programming this week through a used book service. No regrets.
I agree: I had the same reaction until I noticed broken phrases and ellipsis (well, and clicked). It's kind of funny because the first few sentences seem good enough when you follow the submitted link...
Come on. HIV is still a major pandemic, but medical research has given us a dozen compounds against it. If caught early you can live 30 years while HIV-positive. Without medication it's still a death sentence. Try Botswana or Zimbabwe if you think AIDS isn't a problem.

And you should thank the physician who caught that Patrick Sawyer fellow in time. Ebola in Lagos would have been catastrophic.
The Selwyn sundial (my College, FWIW) is also interesting. Rather than showing solar time, it shows the hours since the last sunset and sunrise:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fhk1/Sundials/Selwyn/Selwyn.pdf