skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, I haven't kept up on my data for about 15 years, but back then two of the most strongly correlated factors of a student's performance were 1) how many books were in their home, and 2) how many college educated adults lived nearby. The amount spent per student had a tiny positive correlation. That said, I'm sure there's a minimum baseline of spending per student that needs to be achieved.

With all the raise to the top and gates foundation money floating around since then, I'm sure there is better data now. But, those factors really stuck with me.
The real issue for Uber and Lyft may be the fact that fingerprinting puts them closer to needing to classify drivers as employees instead of contractors. They could surely solve any friction around fingerprinting, but requiring drivers to be classified as employees would put them out of business. Fingerprinting through a government clearinghouse is typically reserved for employees. IMO, they spent $8M on this local vote to delay the real issue as long as possible.
Is that not true?

Microsoft recently doesn't seem to think so.
https://gist.github.com/tsmith512/2a369f897b84ec6949c4df0fa7...

for those wondering what the actual differences were. Frankly it was a good move on the cities part. As a citizen I'm not sure. I relied on uber to get me around when I was feeling lazy. That being said I don't think running background checks through FBI and in-person face to face interviews for drivers are too much to ask. When the companies posed this false dichotomy it turned me off completely. Quite literally threatening the population with disastrous consequences and questionable statistics didn't sit well with me. Neither did the constant barrage of flyers hawking aforementioned stats.
How can you take this article seriously when they write "getting postdoctoral degrees"? There are things to do in Universities beyond getting degrees... like doing science.
When you spend ten years of your life pursuing something, and you feel you have few prospects then it's likely that you'll continue down the same path. The attitude is better the devil you know than the devil you don't. I left academia after my PhD because I felt that I couldn't do another ten years in academia scraping by on $35k/year postdoc salary... Instead I went through a couple of startups, and here I am seven years later making what I probably would have been making had I never left academia. PhDs can make you painfully unhireable. Oh the irony!
She signed an agreement to not give out her logins to two different classified systems to anyone else. She gave the logins to two of her staff members who then used the system for her. It was convenient for her, but the staff members explicitly did not have permission to use the highly classified systems. If they let her off on it then there will be no teeth to the agreement for anyone else.
I actually feel fingerprints are a bad idea but I also feel the city has a right to enact ordinances that the populace believes will help keep them "safer".

One other thought is that why wouldn't Uber/Lyft want these regulations. It seems like the are already the dominant party and fingerprint regulation would create a moat for other competitors to enter.
It's odd that F# is covered, but not C#, Objective-C, or especially C++. It was especially odd to read the description of D without C++ being named. The inclusion of RAII in D is a dead giveaway of its inspiration.
I think most regulation keeps competitors out vs in.
To make FFI lightweight, one follows underlying OS ABI, so there is no need to do any conversions.

Compare Golang or LuaJIT FFI with what Java does. Java uses libffi, but it does unnecessary copying and type and encoding conversions. Golang and LuaJIT has zero-copy FFI due to reusing of OS types (for UNIX-like systems it is C) - just dlload-and-call.

Thin layer (of abstraction) is how Golang's runtime is organized - delegating to an OS instead of reimplementing inside a VM.
Teaching responsibility is mandatory in all CS PhD programs I'm aware of. The pressure is not as bad as other areas, but the deadlines can get very stressful, circumstantially I suppose. The flexibility doesn't really exist: when going for a PhD, you already have a subject picked up, or a project responsibility undertaken, and probably very few ways of going about it because of where the funding's coming from. It's true that the responsibility of getting funding is limited, although some advisors will delegate writing the proposals to postgrads and just review those, taking up the time which you'd spent on your research.

That said, all my friends loved their PhD's, and started hating their choice after they got it.
Na though I wouldn't be surprised if they add an API to verify phone numbers.
Boeing 767 successfully brought ashore on barge in Ireland
The article makes assumptions about job prospects for PhDs and which careers getting a PhD will enable, but is it strange that I want to get a PhD just because I want to be able to do research and learn about all the currently unsolved problems? I realize that I might not be able to do it for a living, but being able to take a few years off and get paid (although very little) to study something of your choosing sounds great in contrast to getting paid more but spending your time doing things other people want you to do.

Would I be better served just taking a few years off and studying on my own? That seems unlikely though since having an advisor is very useful/important..
You make a good point, however it is possible drunk driving could go up in between now (when the 2 biggest ridesharing services leave) and someone creates a competing Austin only startup, prototypes the technology, builds and deploys it, and in parrallel Austin builds the infrastructure to fingerprint all of the new drivers, then the services launches and all of the new people have a small bit of friction in finding and adopting it.

It's totally reasonable for Austin to vote and ask for something that honestly is pretty reasonable. However, it isn't particularly "fair" but they voted againest their own interests (if they wanted ridesharing).
>Where the fuck is the FDA? We send them paperwork and they are happy.

When regulation becomes more about permission than proficiency, you'll get corruption instead of competence.
Eh, it's not easy, and it's an artificial barrier to entry created by the government to enter the space. This has absolutely nothing to do with safety and everything to do with special interests (taxi companies) lobbying to keep competition out of the area.
An instant nationwide fingerprint background check would have a big market opportunity. Not sure why that hasn't been created yet (to my knowledge).

Checkr is just a standard background check, of which Uber/Lyft already do similar checks.
Price of anarchy
Thanks for taking the time to explain.
You're right! Google could also, in the mean time, start providing ridesharing services with their self driving vehicles (note 1: they test them in Austin, in addition to Mountain View; note 2: Google Ventures invested in Uber, not Google proper, Google and Uber are competitors in the self-driving vehicle space). But we're just speculating at this point. Anything could happen!

> However, it isn't particularly "fair" but they voted againest their own interests (if they wanted ridesharing).

I argue this is subjective (they voted "against their own interests"). They voted for more knowledge about their drivers (something they can control). One should not need to forfeit additional safety regulations to a tech company due to irresponsible intoxicated/influenced drivers being used as the proverbial boogyman.
Would you invest in a startup which can be destroyed by its competition at will, i.e. by Uber agreeing to do the checks? Not gonna fly.
This seems interesting. Do you know of any app currently using this. I would like to quickly try it out before the hassle of setting it up myself.
To counter your anecdote, tapentadol (Nucynta) leaves me extremely foggy and out of it at doses below the required dose for pain relief -- far loopier than hydrocodone, oxycodone or oxymorphone.
It's just a responsive design to keep the body text from getting too wide. Most sites do this one way or another, because very wide columns of text are harder to read.

I mean, if you read the same article on medium.com then much of your screen still wouldn't be doing anything - on medium the unused space would be blank margins; here it's a hero image.
It is weird. On the other hand, most news sites these days only use half the screen width for the article, with the rest going to internal links and ads; at least this one uses the wasted space for something relevant to the article.
Because a regulatory moat keeps competitors out because it is a hassle and has increased compliance costs. There seems to be 0 leverage in fingerprinting and I would argue unlikely to provide a stepchange improvement in safety. So Austin would have to establish a way to fingerprint people and verify them which 1) Lyft and Uber have already, 2) WOuld be paid for by Lyft/Uber/Taxpayers 3) WOuld put a huge moat around the onboarding process and add a fuckton of friction.

I agree that cities should be able to enforce laws like this. I disagree with this one, but not their right to. However, to the degree Lyft & Uber provide leverage, they certainly have the right to leave and take their value with them in the hopes Austin reconsiders.
FBI can obtain a warrant if you run Tor [pdf]
Are you in HR?
For what it is worth, Merge is now part of IBM Watson.

http://www.merge.com/News/Article.aspx?ItemID=660

Welcome to the Health Cloud Powered by Watson.
How about investing in a startup to battle the entrenched taxi interests, who seem to have just won a major battle?
My SIP provider passes whatever number I send, for most of the numbers. No talking to them required. Particularly fun for Android phones that do Google Maps lookups for caller ID, so calling from 2024561414 shows up as "The White House"

Just for fun i went ahead and verified 2024561414 with the demo of this thing. It gave me a nice little check mark showing that I was definitely the White House
With the availability of information on the internet and their education levels, I have a hard time believing PhD students don't know about the job prospects. More likely they continue to believe that they will be the exceptional case.
Car Offroad Driving Adventure
Nobody Won in Austin's Ridesharing Election
Less people voted for Prop-1 than signed the petition to create it (39k vs 65k). Uber and Lyft spent over $8m and lost. Sources:
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/01/19/austin-group-gathers..., http://kxan.com/election-results/, http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/ube...
I see. I didn't know that, that's interesting. Question you may be able to answer: The naloxone/Narcan sticks that EMTs and some police have, they also pass them out at needle exchanges, etc. is that why are those applied in the nasal passage?

I'm a layman, but if i'm guessing right the term for this might be 'bioavailability' of the drug, is that correct? for example drug A may be absorbed faster and more easily through the digestive system over snorting. And then of course IV is the quickest way for just about anything, yea?
"Save more [because we need another Chrome panda and we value it more than we value your job.]"

Seriously that's one dev's salary.
> Is the issue the cost of fingerprint checks? Can't fingerprint checks be made cheaper?

The logistics and costs are both high. Honestly I'm all for background checks but fingerprinting is completely unrealistic. There are a lot of on-demand services nowadays some of which drive you places, others go into your home. I can't imagine Uber and Lyft will be the only ones required to do fingerprinting eventually.

Someone has to come up with a better way of doing this, remotely, otherwise it's simply not realistic in my opinion.

> Isn't there a YC company that is in the background check business? Edit: Ah yes, https://checkr.com/

Yeah but checkr doesn't do fingerprinting either.
Like the "morph" fad of the early 90s and the Photoshop/Kai filter fads -- I feel like I'm just waiting for a Geico commercial or OK Go video to use this so we can call it done and move on.

This stuff kinda looks like crap and there seems to be a race to demo as much ugly, unfinished trippy stuff as possible. With the web, I wonder if people will burn out on it before agencies get a chance to mine it to sell cars and insurance.

There certainly is a higher bar now for this sort of publishing. Watching these amateurish videos -- poorly paced and awkwardly chopped together -- just doesn't fly in 2016.
Why Suburbia Sucks
Its free up to 100K SMS per month. Can find any pricing detail from Facebook.
It's not just about Austin, it's about every other market as well. If they don't fight this here then other cities may implement similar fingerprinting restrictions, citing Austin as example. Uber and Lyft have strong incentives to contain this kind of legislation before it spreads.
Sorry, I don't recall businesses using account kit. However, it's pretty easy to do a basic setup.
I suspect it has as much to do with getting the company ready for IPO as much as anything else. Plenty of startups continue on with their "lavish perks".

Also, I'm skeptical of the 25k/employee/year estimate.

Source: An acquaintance runs a large group over there.
Why Implement Machine Learning Algorithms from Scratch?
> Requires updating bathrooms to ensure they have those suitably private stalls

The "default" American restroom design, where you have to make an actual effort to not accidentally spy on people doing their business, is like something out of a comedy dystopia. If it was fiction, people would say it was too implausible. I'm fine with holding owners responsible for fixing this bafflingly wrong-headed design. The fact that it would also completely solve the transgender bathroom issue is a bonus.

(The one concern is ventilation, which is easily solved with louvered vents that allow airflow but not line-of-sight. I once worked in an office with stalls like this, and it was wonderful.)
Discussion from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11650835
I don't know what you mean exactly by "expensive", but the time spent in profiling code should obviously not be counted, and it is quite simple to do so.

The real point I'm trying to make is that tracepoints do not require any changes to the original code. They are entirely opt-in and if you do not choose to use them, your application won't have this extra useless code compiled into it.

That said, the few times I've had to use Visual Studio's tracepoints, they were horribly slow. Apparently this is "by design":

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...

Being an RE, I've implemented and used simple tracers that were more than 100x faster than VS' on hardware not quite as fast as that today (around a decade ago). Watching variables in memory and CPU registers changing in near-realtime is something I very much miss when I have to work in higher-level languages...
If you don't care about side effects:

C:

int foo = bar ? 2 : 4;

Go:

foo := map[bool]int{true:2, false:4}[bar]

Python had a similar trick before 2.5 added ternary conditionals.
>storing emails on a personal server @ her house

has precedent? other Secretaries of State have done so? who?
And then losing your investment when you win the battle and Uber moves in? Why would anyone do that?
This information is too valuable to dissuade companies from collecting and using it. You can't do much as an user if everyone is doing it. In many situations you might not even know that you're being tracked, there already technologies that track you in public places.

IMO this is something that should be regulated.
If a business feels like regulations created by the government are not reasonable, it has all the right to decide to stop doing business. Government shouldn't be regulating such things in the first place, but since it does, it surely can't force businesses to continue working under them.

> but it doesn't seem entirely outrageous that the drivers of buses, taxis, and similar transportation services should have them.

It is outrageous. I mean, it's a vehicle. Not a spaceship, for gods sake. This person has licence and good rating in the app? Good enough for me. If it's not good enough for you, don't use Uber. What right do you (or government, for that matter) have to tell other people what to use or not, I really don't know.
Show HN: StackAI, Aggregator of StackExchange Questions on AI
>was authorized

do you have a source for this?
He said postdoc.
Non-extinct.
I am extremely happy that the my initial postdoc route was a total bust. It was so hard to leave academia and take a risk in the startup space directly after my PhD. I ended up in data engineering/science at a small EdTech startup. Looking beyond the bump in salary (relative to a postdoc), I find my work extremely rewarding, love my colleagues, and really look forward to going into work everyday and developing my skill set. This was probably the best career decision that I made in life so far. This non-traditional career path is hard for my family, friends, and professors to fully digest and absorb. My dad still wonders why I got a degree in virology/immunology and decided to basically go into software engineering. My friends who are still in academia think I made a terrible mistake going into a startup scene completely unrelated to my graduate education. However, I feel like I am getting great training and setting up for a wonderful career. I seriously doubt I would have felt the same way if I ended up as a postdoc in some research lab.
Isn't it http://www.supergenpass.com/?
The point is that we can decide not to fix what isn't broken. Rotation of leadership is a great solution if you have a problem that calls for it. If you don't, then it's not worth it.
I don't see why fingerprinting has to be such a hassle. It wasn't for me. I was able to schedule, online, an appointment with my sheriff's department, get digitally fingerprinted, and background checked all within five days for under $50.

Granted, the privacy aspect is the ever-present issue.
1. Same thing, ban the entire /64, or /48. Now it's similar to banning an IPv4 address.

2. Hacked device on the other side of the firewall has been an issue even with NAT. NAT + firewall is not some magic unicorn, if someone gains access to a device behind your NAT + firewall they are still on your local network. No change there.

3. Most users will use Wifi at home, thus have an IP address that can be tracked. My exit IP for my T-Mobile phone is almost always the same too when I am in the same location...
Alcohol is cheap, legal and abundantly available, and plenty of addicts destroy the lives of themselves and others around them. One part of it is true though: legalisation does reduce crime dramatically. You don't hear of alcoholics breaking into houses to feed their habit.
Disclaimer: I worked on this project for a year in the past, and was also involved with recording this video. I haven't worked on the project for a while though, and it has advanced significantly.

We were using a GreenArrays chip (http://www.greenarraychips.com/) which is a 144-core ultra low power architecture. That's great, but it's super difficult to program, and only a few experts can really do it. We were working on building a high-level programming language and compiler toolchain that would allow anyone with programming experience to write GreenArrays programs.

So we were basically building a compiler, but with a twist - instead of a traditional compiler which generates machine code from source code through a series of transformations, we used a technique called program synthesis. Synthesis treats the high-level program (source) as a specification, and performs a search across the space of possible target programs (machine code), trying to find the optimal one (in our case, optimal meant energy efficient). The backend uses a bunch of Programming Language techniques and SMT solving (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability_modulo_theories).

As you can imagine, this is a hard problem and synthesis isn't quite ready to replace sophisticated compilers. But where synthesis can really shine is in places where you don't have mature compilers and need to generate complicated optimal code, that perhaps no human or human-written compiler might. Or in cases where parts of the program need to be extra-optimized.

Coming back to the experiment, the integer division code running on the chip was generated using synthesis, and we wanted to show that we could run it on low energy.
> I was able to schedule, online, an appointment with my sheriff's department, get digitally fingerprinted, and background checked all within five days for under $50.

I think you just described a good part of the hassle. Not everyone driving for Uber / Lyft have $50 to use for fingerprinting services and a similar cost, even heavily discounted, represents a significant cost to the companies if they're covering it. Then you have the whole part where, currently, anyone can pick up people and provide lots of supply for the customer demand but if they all have to wait that introduces a huge amount of friction (so less drivers).

Granted this is just in the city of Austin so it's possible to handle it without great difficulty. But if this were to apply across the nation? That would be devastating for the businesses.
I think you're incorrect - this is the future of animation.

Whilst these are pasted together samples - imagine the power of animating a piece, then being able to adjust the style at will. This takes a ton of manual work out of that, and quite magical to me.
Why is it even remotely reasonable that taxi drivers should have background checks? Are we really that worried about rogue taxi drivers? What is the worst case scenario here? What exactly does a background check for taxi drivers prevent?

The idea that the state should have anything to say about driving a car in exchange for money is absurd on its face and nothing more than the worst, silliest kind of security theater in my view.
Animated map showing everyone to immigrate to the U.S. Since 1820
A very similar post appeared on reddit.
Almost identical.
I rolled over at 65 MPH in a Nissan Versa and it almost looked saleable afterward. Mostly front-end damage.
> Would their drivers refuse to undergo them?

Refuse is probably a strong word here but I imagine significantly less people are willing to drive in somewhere to give their fingerprints for a background check than just entering a social security number in a web form. So there's more inherent friction. But then Uber needs to maintain an office (or a set of offices) in every city that provides convenient parking and some kind of fingerprinting system. So it puts uber in a business that they're not in and makes it harder for drivers to become drivers.
> You wouldn't be caught upside down in it. Tesla was unable to flip the Model X in testing

That doesn't mean you "wouldn't be caught upside down in it" unless it can literally flip itself back over after every possible roll.

I would still prefer to crash a Model S than any other car
The most interesting thing for me is how easily KGB survived the fall of the USSR. Not only did they seamlessly continue all their espionage programs started during the Cold War, but they also easily came back into full power in less than a decade, appointing one of their agents as the ruler of Russia for life.

This shows the power of any major secret service. They can do literally anything they want. They don't care about anything except their own survival, and they will easily adapt to any circumstances and any political climate.
Was the petition online?