skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 | 121 comments

I remember it coming up :)

I used to volunteer in an anarchist-led bookshop. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was one of the texts I was referred to upon starting in order to help me understand that one ought to spend a bit of time thinking about hierarchies (or the lack thereof) and their consequences.

This is my take on the topic given some reflection. Like money, hierarchies are not intrinsically bad. Like money, hierarchies are a tool for getting shit done. Money can be abused. Why? Because greed. Because the will to power. We know what money is good for, it is an abstraction that facilitates exchange and trade. What are hierarchies good for? Coordinated action via a chain of command. Hierarchies can be abused. Same reasons. Because greed. Because the will to power.

I've been thinking recently about a certain type of hierarchy where the stratification is highly ordered. Think military hierarchies. Each layer reports only to the one above. There is a strict chain of command. Orders must be followed without question. Because this special type of hierarchy emerges again and again (think about how we structure a very complex text even) I thought it must have a name. I couldn't find one so I'm suggesting isomerarchy. All from ancient Greek: we all know that iso means same, like isomorphic, isobar, and so on; meros is less familiar and means part or division, the study of parts and parthood is mereology[1]; finally, archon[2] means ruler from which we get monarch (literally rule by the one). Hence, isomerarchy. Funnily enough, both isomer[3] and merarch[4] are both existing concepts which rely on exactly this etymology.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merarches
Using taxation for behavior modification is wrong. The public is helpless and powerless in going up against the sheer horsepower government can deploy to force you to pay taxes or adopt the behavior they want you to start, quit or modify.

This idea of taxing anything we can pull out of our asses is perverted in so many ways. Tax pencils so people use less paper? Sure. Tax bank ATM transactions so people do more online? Why not. Tax anything we can imagine at any time.

I have a very fundamental problem with this idea of taxing whatever the fuck politicians can imagine because it leads to more waste, misuse and more control of the people by government.

Case in point: One of my favorites is the County of Los Angeles Business Property Tax.

What do you think this is? You think "property tax", it must be tax on a building you own.

Wrong.

This is a tax on EVERYTHING you have inside the building. Any property the business owns, is taxed. Property? Yes, your desk, stapler, photocopier, chairs, coffee machine, tables, printers, computers, projectors, etc. Even tenant improvement costs are considered "business property" and fall under this tax.

And you get taxed on this crap FOREVER!

So, you bought a desk, paid state sales tax when you did and now you get to pay the County of Los Angeles a small annual tax on that desk in perpetuity based on the value of the desk every year.

Do you have a factory full of CNC machines and sophisticated manufacturing equipment? Pay up!

Do you have a small tech company with a couple of dozen cubicles and nice computers? Pay up!

It's sick. Truly sick. We are being taxed to death from every angle. Very soon they are going to install a fart meter in every chair and find a way to tax your farts.

Where does the money go? Who knows. As I said, truly sick.
> Since gender is a social construct

The real issue is that there was never a discussion or vote on this proposition. People have the right to be offended when their language is pulled out from under them without their consent. It doesn't make people bigoted to insist that the meaning of words matter. The whole thing comes across as very Orwellian to many.

"Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
Good Abstractions Have Fewer Leaks
The probability of you getting on a nuclear weapons equipped bomber on a mission to drop a nuclear bomb is infinitesimal though I suppose it's something you may want to watch out for and report if it ever seems likely that you have stepped aboard such a plane.
Hi,
there's a free phone verification using facebook.
It's account kit.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/accountkit/overview

What do you guys think?
That doesn't really give an example of them injecting malware into the http traffic of an innocent user.

With the Great Cannon, not only did they inject malware into the traffic of an innocent user, they injected malware into the traffic of all innocent users whose traffic went through certain Great Firewall routers.

I've used this example several times when talking to website owners who think they don't need https. My goal is to provide a specific example of how their website visitors are being attacked. With the apparently targeted attacks of Quantum Insert, the website owners could convince themselves that only terrorists are targeted, and that thus they don't need to bother protecting anyone. With the completely untargeted Great Cannon attacks, I hope to prove to them that their website visitors are actual innocent victims.
Even before stepping down, it was wrong of here to store the emails on her personal server. I'm not sure, however, if that is criminal, civil, or legal but an OPSEC violation.

There is also concerns because these servers were used (either deliberately or through incompetence) to hide documents from FOIA requests.
Safari's "Reader" mode solves the problem completely. I think Firefox has something similar.
I feel like I'm missing something. Reasonable people can disagree about what jobs should/should not require a background check, but it doesn't seem entirely outrageous that the drivers of buses, taxis, and similar transportation services should have them.

> Unfortunately, the rules passed by the City Council don’t allow true ridesharing to operate.

Why? Like, I read the whole article twice, and I'm still confused. It's being presented as "Uber is literally unable to operate with this rule in place", but why? Do they need to fund the background checks? Are they too expensive? Would their drivers refuse to undergo them? Would their drivers fail them? Do taxi companies face the same rules? How is it they can maintain service?

I don't get it.
From the perspective of an ex-cisco employee, two main reasons:

1) Because it never ends at cutting overhead. In fact it would be quite accurate to say it never ends. I still have contacts with cisco employees and the fear of mass-layoffs has gotten worse every year, I am told since 2001 (I wasn't yet an employee in 2001). When the "overhead" in my office was visibly cut, I thought like you did, it was a mistake.

Firstly, I should have immediately found another job. Granted it took another year and a half, but I could have done far better, even with just a bit of preparing. I thought I'd work forever at cisco. In retrospect that was a very, very bad assumption to make.

Secondly, I should have taken my employment contract to a lawyer. Because they fucked me on severance, stock options, and a few other things. You see, paying employees, especially during mass-layoffs, definitely is something they maximally cut (even to the point of probably being illegal).

2) Because top level managers keep making things worse. At cisco, the specific thing that made me really angry was that we could no longer book our own flights. We had to use the company travel agency. Then you find out what really happened: senior management was told they could no longer expense first-class flights for their entire family. So what did they do ? They went to a particular airline, and negotiated a deal : free first class flights for them (meaning at sub-business prices), if everyone at cisco would fly economy and business only with that airline. Mind you, this was the one that made me blow up, it was far from the only thing.
The darknet is very straightforward to use and almost riskless for a small time buyer
From what has been shown to date storing emails on her personal server was authorized and there is no clear evidence she removed classified material. There are a lot of allegations going around but only the FBI is going to know what is true or not.

But even if everything she did is true the issue is around malicious intent. That will be the key factor in whether she is indicted or not.
I can imagine that it might be easier to walk on an ice rink with socks than rubber shoes.
At the risk of sounding like I'm actually going to abuse this capability... if it's done "relatively easily", how is this done?
I've heard a few people in CS say they loved their postdocs. My outsider's impression is: there's generally no teaching responsibility, no pressure or anxiety over your thesis/graduation (the biggest stressor for a PhD), generally more flexibility in your research agenda (though it depends on the lab), less pressure to find funding, and there's no stigma to just leaving or moving around whenever you want (it is common to leave a postdoc after just a year). Although you're still paid poorly.
There are a lot of AWD/4WD cars in WA and they generally get waved through without chains. In truly bad conditions they might check everybody. Driving through the mountains in really bad conditions is time intensive.
The video linked is much better IMO.
Yeah. My impression is that spending a few years in industry research (and publishing) still leaves the door open for the academic track, although this is all hearsay.
This article by the founder of a well known Austin startup incubator explains it well: https://austinstartups.com/austin-tech-vote-for-prop-1-on-ma...
Maxwell currently leads when it comes to DX12 feature support (along with Skylake), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_levels_in_Direct3D#Dir... . I don't know what Pascal has but I doubt it'd be a regression.
Calling someone on vitriol isn't claiming sainthood. Knowing 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't make me a genius at mathematics either.
Even after factoring in massive debt?
The sticking point for your friend is that apprenticeship or equivalent and relevant electrical experience requirements tend to be full-time.
It was definitely wrong but the issue is that it wasn't unprecedented. Kerry was in fact the only Secretary of State to use the State Department email address. And with regards to FOIA under the Federal Records Act it was permissible to use a private email server so long as the requisite records were preserved which it appears they were.

Anyone who thinks this is some cut and dry issue is deluding themselves.
Sure. But you don't get to pick the least reliable model of the NINE lines of SEDANS that BMW makes, and then decide that its a fair comparison.

Tesla has two lines of cars right now, and only a third one planned. Their entire focus is supposed to be on the reliability and features of these two lines they're making.
I switched to a different SIP provider as they were cheaper, but my number was still held at the old SIP provider and couldn't be ported. I explained the story and asked if they could 'virtually' add that number to my account so outgoing calls would come from that number. They just switched on the feature to enable me to set the caller id to anything as it was easier for them.
I mean the guys who are successful you mentioned, i assume they have nice jobs, families, maybe children -- the good stuff. Once shit hits the fan and they get a taste of dopesickness they will ignore all of that, the drug becomes priority #1 hell with everything else. Then they will do whatever and screw over whoever to fix the link of the chain that broke (ie, where to get them or how to pay for them, how to hide it, or whatever the problem may be) just like every other junkie. You will eventually look in their eyes and see nothing, like every other junkie. It's a short ride from having it all to having nowhere to sleep.

It's a cycle and story told time and time again. If your friends want to stay successful and keep the good stuff in their lives they should get off the shit is all i'm saying. That's nowhere near easy to do, but it's gotta be done or they will crash & burn. Opiates don't really cure the pain anyway, just mask it.

Goring had the advantage of being in a prominent position close to the leader before he got hooked and fell off. I'm sure any other lower nazi officer would've been cast off if they weren't buddies with the fuhrer. He also was in the advantageous (but bad) position of being able to tell his doctor "you're going to give me this dope when i ask for it or i'm going to toss you in the fucking oven"
In my state, you're not supposed to speed and fly into fields either. (Maybe Germany has a passengers law too — the kid was ignoring other laws already.)
Cool! Congratulations! I also think that approach sounds potentially very fertile, and painfully feel the inadequacy of existing methods of programming to the tasks we face today. What kinds of media of expression have you come up with?
The author makes the false dilemma that you can either have fingerprint background checks OR less DUI accidents through ridesharing services. You can have both; you'll just need to fill the gap with ridesharing services who will comply with the new regulation.

This section is especially egregious:

> What happens if Prop 1 passes?

> Austin sends a message to the world, “Innovation is welcome here. Things are stable now and the people have spoken.”

Austin spoke (and not Austin's government, Austin's voters!). Innovation is welcome, simply with additional (voter desired and approved) regulations.

If ridesharing is sufficiently lucrative with these additional required regulations, competitors will fill the gap. If not, Austin's voters may re-evaluate their decision at a future date.
> chains with this kind of fixation tend to slip out during hard cornering / spirited driving

Uh, how fast were you driving with chains? When you need chains it's a bit of an extraordinary set of circumstances that typically warrant doing significantly less than posted speed limits. I don't think I've ever seen anyone attempt to do hard cornering or anything that would be considered "spirited driving" with them on. That seems like the exact opposite of what you should do with any type of tire wrap that is meant to add traction to your vehicle.
I think BASIC! for android by Paul Laughton is a modern good modern alternative for an entry to programming. It comes with good documentation and examples, and is a classic basic-type language.
link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.basic&...

Once a kid might want to move up from that to solve perhaps more practical problems using PCs, I think a combination of bash (including basic usage of rsync, crontab, grep, sed, find, wget, ssh,...) and maybe VBA/Libreoffice Basic can take you a long way. (You can easily make nice little form/button based applications by dragging and dropping in the office suites. Also check out http://excelunusual.com/ for some inspiration on things you can do in VBA which I would not have thought practical!).
Totally agree. Uber could come up with a quick way to do fingerprint background checks. Just have the driver, go through a drive-through background check stop. It might take 5 minutes, but I thought Uber & Lyft drivers had a short orientation anyway. Kill 2 birds.

After reading Josh Baer's article, I do agree with him that its a lot easier to point at a startup and say something is easy, without all the knowledge from the inside. I am sure there is a lot of data on why this is hard to do.

I do think that part of this boils down to liability. If a certain percentage of drivers are known offenders of some kind, Uber or Lyft could get sued for letting them remain on their platform.

Super sad to see Uber go. Its a great app. I use it almost daily. Reality hasn't set in yet.
Sounds like a business opportunity for a startup: we will operate in compliance in areas where Uber/Lyft won't.
Yes ask your boss.

> We will lose credibility with our customers if we claim that our application does not collect any usage data when this is going out over the wire.

Microsoft wasted Win10 and Office 2016 already (and sneaked it into newer Win7&8 updates). It would have been such a great chance after the misguided/failed Win8, but then MS decided to add invasive telemetry and other phone home crap incl whitelisting IPs and URLs in kernel mode network layer, with no way to deactivate all of it - don't even think MS respects you as a end consumer (you are their sheep and loose control of your PC) and not even as enterprise customer nor with LTSB (except you request a custom build of the network stack).
Ask HN: Fix Quota curl -s ip.appspot.com?
It's one of the most useful server commands when I'm checking DNS propagation and stuff. It was the best and fastest IP checker out there. I had thought it was google backed.
Why do they still call it ride sharing?

Just yesterday it was in the news that Uber drivers will now accept tips.

How is this anything else than a glorified app based taxi service? Maybe call it freelancing taxi, but definitely not ride sharing.

On a positive note, I am glad to see Uber respecting the law for once!
Is the issue the cost of fingerprint checks? Can't fingerprint checks be made cheaper? Isn't there a YC company that is in the background check business?

Edit: Ah yes, https://checkr.com/
Dubai freehold property guide
Basically, because there is no verification/validation surrounding caller id - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing
Pitting social issues against scientific progress is a false binary. Feynman, for example, was a Jewish kid from a remarkably normal family whose genius flourished in the more progressive atmosphere of New York City (less anti-Semitism and good public schools). Since genius of this kind seems to manifest infrequently and anomalously, making sure wherever it appears it isn't crushed under prejudice or denied sufficient opportunity seems like it should be a high priority.
Most VoIP providers let you use any number as the caller ID with a simple SMS verification. So, if you were to have access to someone's phone for a few minutes you could possibly verify it and use the number for making calls and sending text messages from the VoIP service.

I believe the SMS verification is something that companies use to avoid liability alone, technically they can use any number as the caller ID if they choose to.
Checking in from Austin. Both companies are framing this as "pausing" operations. This is just another negotiation tactic, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't really see what your complaint is.

The problem you're describing isn't a shortcoming of jq and the other tools in the article, it's a shortcoming of the brain dead JSON encoding.

If you need to process data like that, you'll have to console yourself to the fact it won't be process-able as a shell one-liner.
We're not talking about inherent bad, or about oxygen. We're talking about addiction to opiates, which ruins lives and kills people.

I've seen it first hand. Stop this nonsense.
There are 2 answers to this.

Lyft, which made the above qoute and Uber, obviously could continue operating if breifly pausing to fingerprint their drivers. However, the first answer to your question is that they won't. The premise of ridesharing is about scalable technology that allows people to work together on a platform. It would be an expensive precedent for these companies to have to pay for this cost. This is regardless of how you the consumer feel. There is also a very non-trivial impediment to get drivers to do this, especially if they are barred for something like a felony, even non-violent or not related to a vehicle. The difference is who controls the process, which wasn't stated in the article. I suspect a 3rd prty (e.g. Austin) would want drivers to come into a public place (police staton/town hall) and get fingerprinted. I do not believe that could simply thumbprint a phone.

The second answer is privacy & convenience. A driver is unlikely to want to get fingerprinted and it probably makes little difference. Why should some agency get potentially millions of fingerprints (if this become national) when it would serve no purpose. Maybe they can serve warrants, ect. Again, idk if this is good or bad from a public standpoint but in practice Uber/Lyft already have a car, registration, license, picture, social media and very quickly a review system. So to the extent someone wanted to cheat, it would just be another small ipediment.
> Quantum mechanics can't seem to be imitable by a local classical computer.

So is this a fatal flaw in Wolfram's "new kind of science" based on cellular automata?
>Although you're still paid poorly.

In the US, yes - in Australia postdocs get between 60k and 90k per year, with an additional 15-17% that goes into your Super (retirement account - Australia's equivalent of US' 401k). I'm a "new" post-doc in Perth with a salary of 86k p/y and my wife doesn't need to work.

But yes, so far I'm enjoying it greatly, after a few years of the constant Damocles' sword of my thesis deadline dangling over my head the freedom is great!
Interactive SOM-map of world universities (2016 Times University Rankings data)
I am really confused at this article. Uber and Lyft don't want to operate in areas that require fingerprint based background checks. I get it. Harder to get drivers, more process, etc.

But isn't that just a cost of doing business? On the surface this seems reasonable. Uber/Lyft are welcome to raise fares if the background checks result in less drivers on the road. Subsequently the consumer is welcome to not use Uber/Lyft if it gets too expensive.

Maybe I am missing something?
The efforts of Uber and Lyft over the last few months to rewrite the laws of the City of Austin to their pleasing through a not-at-all-subtle application of money, spam and propaganda went far, far beyond taste. Doesn’t matter if you support the TNC companies or not (I mostly do), but they went way too far in their blatant attempts to subvert the democratic process of our city. So, yeah, no thanks – don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I imagine they will have better luck corrupting the State of Texas legislature to override the cities, but have fun doing this 49 more times.
Some friends and I used to make prank calls with fake funny caller IDs using https://www.spoofcard.com/
Even with heroin being illegal, I've seen people get it without a problem. They have to resort to no crime to get it other than getting it itself being a crime. But this hurts no one.

What hurts people isn't getting it, it's what they do as addicts. Throw their lives away, resorting to crime to live day to day, get housing and food… They partly ruin the lives of those close to them too.

Legalization would do nothing to help this, it would just hurt a little. They'd get it a bit easier, but since they didn't resort to violent crime to get it in the first place it would be meaningless. The crime and disaster they cause after getting it and becoming addicted would remain.

But like you said in the other branch, we have seen different people and have had different experiences.
I find it to be a useful term to delineate the apps from traditional taxi services in conversation but otherwise I agree entirely. Both firms likely enjoy the term in press coverage because it makes them seem less threatening.
She didn't have a reason to have classified material on the server after she stepped down. Even if she had the OK from the administration for it during her tenure, she should have given the emails back to the government after resigning (as they aren't her property, and as mentioned are on some occasions deemed top secret).
oh noo, 50% increase on the median annual income. whatever will they do.