skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually they were all junk. Even the "good ones" and they knew it. When the pool became so shitty that the rating agencies were about to start rating them as junk they changed their rating "algorithm" at the behest of the banks. It was straight up fraud all around but the govt just didn't want to prosecute the anyone that mattered.
@dang this is off topic
Realtime GPU Audio (2013)
> could [you] combine corporate income taxes with a law against "passing on" those taxes.

Short answer: No. Tax incidence doesn't work that way.

Long answer: The concept doesn't even make sense; a company can pay taxes in an accounting sense, but not in an economic one. Since a corporation is not a real person, every dollar of tax is by definition passed on; all we can do is try and figure out if it's being passed on to customers (via higher prices), employees (via lower wages), or investors (via lower returns). But, obviously, every dollar going into the treasury is a dollar not going into some real person's pocket. Unless we start letting companies cover their tax bills by printing money. :)

Of course, what you probably meant was "a law against passing on those taxes to specific groups"; you're looking for a way to force the tax to be passed on to investors and not employees (or whatever). In which case the answer is...

...still no. Because tax incidence (which is the technical name for this) isn't just a matter of deciding how to divy up a tax bill. If investors face lower returns, they'll invest less money (both because they'll have less money to invest, because they'll decide to invest in other areas where taxes are lower, and because they'll decide to consume more and invest less). Investment, at an industry level, is strongly correlated with productivity (eg, build a new factory and your employees can make more widgets), and productivity (again at an industry level) is strongly correlated with wages. Or in other words: If you tax investment in an industry heavily, you'll end up with decrepit plant and poorly paid workers. That's how taxes on investment end up being born by workers, not by some sort of conscious decision to cut wages to free up more money for dividends.

And no law is going to stop it either. Is a union supposed to bargain with a company as if there were other employers in the industry paying high wages, even though there aren't, because there's been industry-wide under-investment for the past 10 years? Does your law force investors to invest as if they were receiving dividends, even though they're not? Does this law apply to foreign investors? Are you going to try and order round some massive Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund and tell them how much they would have invested without the tax, and send them an invoice for the balance?

In short: The issue has been well studied. It might work in a world without trade, globalization, and the free-ish movement of labour, capital, and goods. It doesn't work in our world.
I first learned about this when I read about a patent dispute. Someone (I don't recall the name) invented a coupler that could be used to easily splice a fiber optic cable (e.g. under water) and tap into all it's signal undetected. The inventor was denied patent rights and lost all control of his invention b/c the U.S. government claimed States Secrets, thus no court case on the matter could proceed.
Twitter is blocking Turkish-Dutch Twitter accounts in Turkey
This is an interesting point. My wife is Chinese and she explained this to me: people like her grandfather are thankful for Mao while they acknowledge his failures. The reason is simple: before Mao there was a long period of Chaos, and before that the Qing dynasty was an extremely oppressive government. Without going into too many details, the peasants were being screwed for hundreds of years. Because of Mao's efforts China became a unified country. Sure, there were decades of terror and famine the severity of which are astonishing, but they were relatively brief historicaly speaking and the people were just happy that China was "theirs". Moreover, the government was stable enough that the people who came after Mao were able to improve things, which didn't always happen historically.

It's not a great comparison but a similar thing happened with the Ming dynasty. If I recall correctly, the Ming emperor was terribly brutal, but people were so thankful that it wasn't the mongolians that they didn't care.
I believe Larry Niven had one as well; I don't remember how long it lasted, due to relativistic effects.

The Ethics of Madness, I think it was called.
I think the ancestor post was referring to python 2's separate str and unicode types, not bytes vs str.
to get water from ground, drill a hole about an inch diameter so long pipe can be inserted.

if you can get good water within 9 meters, that's great because standard pump can suck up to 9 meter down.

if you get salty, rusty, smelly colored water, drill deeper. 30m is pretty much max depth for home-use jet pump and normally you get clean water.

you can get deeper too and use bigger hole too; however, that's when you need permit. industry and hotel often do because they need a lot of water very fast.

water collected from pump can be stored in large tank above roof. then gravity plays it part delivering tank-water.

there's a switch on the tank that cuts electricity to the pump when a buoy inside the tank float up to a certain level. so, my switch is simpler water-level-based, not pressure-based.

from empty to full, my pump runs about 30 min. my pump is 1 horse power or about 750w. so for a month that would be 30 * 30/60 * 750w = 11.25 kwh.

for disposals, my house get two lines. one for washing, bathing, etc and that goes to city sewer. another is for human waste that goes to house ground sewage tank.

sewage tank is basically an unsealed empty space inside ground. bacteria decompose human waste and the water just get filtered by ground beneath. the tank gets full over time and sewer tank service can come and suck the sewage tank.
> where engaging in some voluntary activity is punished by prison sentences or expropriation of wealth. That is textbook authoritarian intervention.

That's not what authoritarianism means. When society restricts some individual freedoms that's not always authoritarianism. You personally may not like it; you may be ideologically opposed to it, but that's not enough to make it authoritarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

Otherwise, every possible society would necessarily be authoritarian for a simple reason: a society comprises more than one person. For simplicity assume there are only two. Either person A is allowed to do as they like -- including things that may restrict B's freedoms -- in which case the system is authoritarian, or there is some social mechanism in place that forbids A from behaving in this way, in which case the system is also authoritarian.
> Something like TypeScript though? Only checks that variable types match.

TypeScript's type system is unsound, so you can't rely on the type checker alone to prove anything useful. However, manually proving things about TypeScript programs is still easier than doing so with JavaScript programs.

I don't believe it's practical to rely on type checkers to prove absolutely everything. There are mathematically proven upper bounds on how much you can automate reasoning. For instance, global type inference only works with first-order type languages. Higher-order anything flies out of the window, yet higher-order properties of programs need to be proven!

What we ought to do is find the optimal division of labor between automated and manual proving, always keeping in mind that the optimal case isn't being able to prove something. The optimal case is not having to prove it because it's obviously true. How do we design a programming language so that more interesting things are obviously true?
Your version, "and there's an even easier way...", does sound nicer than, "If even this is too much effort, ..."

There's a difference in tone there.
Excellent article, well thought out, a parsimonious distillation of the essence of day-to-day management. However it ignores a crucial issue in all management jobs, and that is credibility erosion. "Boss doesn't have a clue about the code". Which leads to "I'm cleverer than the boss" and creates a big management problem. So once in a while the boss has to show why he's boss, that he's amongst the best at the line-functions of the job. Nothing worse for team morale and productivity, than professional managers who do everything Tom Bartel has said here perfectly, but have no operational competence or credibility in the actual domain that the the team operates in.
You cited the opinions of connections to backup your general feeling that taxi service is bad.

Is it your opinion, or the consensus opinion of your connections, that 80% of the time the card reader is broken, or that the percentage of taxis which are clean is near 0 (or some other claim similar to these)?

If you're not making claims of that extremity, then whatever you are talking about isn't very related to what anyone else here has said, and depending on the specifics, I may even agree with you, but it wouldn't be relevant to a thread where the primary claim that started the disussion is that taxi service is overwhelmingly always unbelievably bad.

If you are making claims of that extremity, then I don't believe them, and feel that disbelieving them is simply a matter of the claims being too much of an outlier to deserve any serious plausibility.
I've never had one of these moments. It's just been shit my entire life, then when it seemed as though things were about to get better, the sea of idiots descended again and shit even more, leaving me here 6+ years later constantly getting harassed, as I'm living with my mother, while being unemployed and low functioning, because the harassment and torture makes it impossible for me to think, progress, or move on.
The robo-signing stuff is straight up illegal. But that falls under my original point 1: The people doing that were tiny, tiny fish, who had nothing to do with the CDOs.

> The rating agencies could have been defrauded and if people sold those while not really believing they were of the rated quality IMO it's still fraud.

Legally that's a harder question than you might imagine. However...

...there's absolutely zero evidence of this on a systemic basis. Banks overwhelmingly made it clear that they believed the assets were good. The bailouts went primarily to institutions that had originated utter crap and then held on to it because they thought it was a great investment. Studies have been done to look at the personal investments of bank executives; it turns out they were closely correlated with their job; the more you knew about CDOs and MBSs, and the more closely linked to the system you were, the more you thought CDOs were safe as houses, and the more willing you were to have your retirement invested in it.

Conversely, the small handful of Cassandras were utterly ignored by the world in large part because they were complete outsiders who had no inside knowledge. The arguments boiled down to: "What do they know? The people who know the most about CDOs are all in; these people must just not understand the models."

(There are exceptions in specific cases. One that springs to mind is Fabrice Tourre[1]. But he was very much the exception to the rule, and it's probably not a coincidence he worked at Goldman...)

> It could have all been innocent but it certainly smells and warrants investigating.

And it was. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view) no smoking guns emerged.

[1]: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldmansachs-sec-tourre-id...
FreeBSD is a second class citizen when it comes to the JVM.

Myth?
There are many people who are saying that the NSA would use radio waves / only store the data. Why not forward the data to another fiber optic connection which is friendly to you to a datacenter.
At least on Android you can generate a fake VPN-esque connection locally that passes everything through a proxy, so the proxy isn't exposed to the application
Because I don't understand the glory of owning one of these machines
Well, I still do believe you, because I don't make it a habit of calling a person a liar with no verifiable proof to the contrary.

Good luck with everything.
A car using this stuff wouldn't need to refuel as frequently as one that uses a battery (environmental concerns are an orthogonal issue)
Hand-wavy conflation of communism-as-economic-system and communism-as-government to describe brutal totalitarian states that happen to have a communist economic system is exactly what I'm talking about. It's an easy thing to do, because

>Communism is both a form of government and an economic system (although there is variance in the form of the economic aspect of it)

My example of calling some randomly selected totalitarian dictatorship "capitalist" isn't interesting or informative because it's clearly referencing the economic system, rather than making the implicit claim that it's also the government form, as does describing the regime as "communist".
The initial expectations for fusion were even more ambitious and with good reason.

Fission was first done in 1938, by 1956 there was a commercial reactor.

Given that sort of time frame and the fact that fusion research was well underway it seemed that a decade or two was all that was needed.

Then you had breakthroughs with Tokomaks and so on, each time it seemed that fusion was potentially close.

There's a really good book called 'The Sun in a Bottle' that goes into more detail.
I use Feedly with Reeder for Mac as the RSS client.
I got curious about the etymology of this, and it's not clear to me that wikipedia is right on this one. According to [1], the earliest use of "even" and "odd" for functions goes back to Euler [2]. It's been a long time since high school Latin, but it doesn't look like he has the Taylor series in mind here. He certainly calls out the functions f(x) = x^n for some n as even or odd, and notes that the sums work in the ways you'd expect, but he also talks about ratios of those functions, which he wouldn't need to do if he were assuming smoothness and could just expand out the Taylor series of the ratio. It's unclear, but it looks to me like he's using "even" and "odd" to draw an algebraic analogy.

[1] http://jeff560.tripod.com/e.html
[2] http://eulerarchive.maa.org/docs/originals/E005.pdf , section XVII.
No, Mao Xian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_County) in Sichuan is not named after Chairman Mao. The 'Mao' in its name and the 'Mao' in his name are different characters. (Chairman Mao --> 毛

茂 --> Mao County)
YouTube: costs are higher than profit, every second?
It's certainly true that China massively changed its land use policy following the PRC's formation. What I think is most interesting to consider, though, is whether the collectivization process had the same catalyzing action as enclosure in pre-industrial Britain. In both cases villages were pushed from a subsistence-driven existence towards top-down control, trade, and an uprooting of labor that could subsequently move to cities and work in factories. China's development into a modern industrial country may well have been premised on the massive application of violence of the early PRC era.

This prompted me to Google for "enclosure vs collectivization" which brought up this interesting-looking article on the topic [0].

[0] http://praxeology.net/SEK3-AQ-3.htm
There is no point in making sweeping generalizations about any sizable human group - humans never behave monolithically. This certainly applies to Christianity and Islam with all their history of sects that have spent half their energy fighting the other sects within the "same" religion. It makes even less sense in the case of "atheism" which encompasses many unrelated belief systems. Many have argued that many of the belief system movements ostensibly related to Marxism went on to commit great evil precisely because they became defacto religions complete with bibles (e.g. red books), prophesy and personality cult "Gods". Somehow no matter whatever humanistic goals belief movements start with, very quickly individuals within the movement are able to increase their own power by emphasizing the need to demonize outsiders/ non-believers and to squelch disagreement.
Still, none of those were committed in the doctrine of atheism. Atheism has no doctrine yet you can point to many people who kill today and many in the past who point to their holy texts after they've cut people's heads off, drowned "witches" and otherwise stole life and land in the name of their gods.
Mechanical engineer to programmer
26 yo MechE with a MS degree from a top engineering school in the US. Been working in industry for 3 years and want to move into a programming role. Have done little to no real mechanical engineering other than light design work, but most of my job has been specific to the industry that I'm in. I learned a good bit of Matlab and some C while in college, and have picked up the basics of python and C++ while working, but haven't built any "real" apps other than some basic prototyping. What's the best way that I can move into being a software developer/engineer/programmer? I see a lot of bootcamp opportunities, and they are really tempting, but are all for web development. I've played around with html, css, js, etc. and they are neat, but I know I wouldn't truly enjoy a front-end dev role in the long term. Just looking to hear some suggestions, thanks!
Sex and Money  a Thai story
Then the awful rules can be challenged in a court of law, which will act as the limiting power on the SEC. There does exist a mechanism for challenging malicious prosecution in our legal system, and if the corporations feel they are victimized, they can use it.

The point, however, is without antagonistic checks and balances in place, you will always run into the "revolving door" problem.
I do not believe this statement to be correct: it seems entirely possible for this to be done via reckless incompetence, rather than criminal fraud. All it takes is for somebody to calculate the risk incorrectly and everybody else to fail to check their calculations.

It may involve criminal fraud, but it is also possible that it does not.
See? There you go again. Man, trolls here are way less funny than on reddit.
> You're making something that others can enjoy and that you can look at and appreciate. It can live on when you've passed. When you play a game, you do enjoy the experience, but at the end of it all, you've not created anything of value.

So you spend your time creating something for other people to consume, then note that the act of consuming it is useless?
Best Telescopes for the Money – 2016 Reviews and Guide
Threedo: Scan 3D Objects with a Mobile Phone
sorry for late reply...

Had it for almost a year. Almost no fan noise whatsoever.
Just as a total aside, sometimes the 'reply' link doesn't appear beneath a comment, especially if it is new. If you click on the permalink for that comment (the time next to the commenter's username), it will take you to a page for just that comment, and will have a box for replying.

I only mention it because I believe you are replying to comments below, but by making replies to an earlier comment instead of the actual comment you are replying to -- and sometimes this is why.

I've definitely done that before, and thought perhaps it was a reply limit from HN or something (which can happen).

> I don't make it a habit of calling a person a liar with no verifiable proof to the contrary.

This is an unfair mischaracterization of what I've said.

If someone makes an extraordinary claim and has no evidence, you probably shouldn't just believe it. Choosing not to believe it based on a reasonable statistical premise (e.g. the failure rate of card readers is not high enough such that 80% of them are always broken) is perfectly valid, and is not impolite or rude. It's not at all the same thing as "calling them a liar." The burden of proof is on the party making extraordinary claims.
Native Americans ..not Indians.
Dialectical materialism is a Marxist view of history, which is generally what people mean when they use the word "dialectic" in this context.

These may be useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
I was approached by nuclear fusion advocates during a 1981 Anit-Nuke demonstration in NYC. I have always been scientifically-minded, so it actually set me on a course of reading up on all things nuclear. A lot of the marchers were not generally educated on nuclear science.

Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be further along, and better off, if less scare and more education were available about it.

Solar energy, the production, usage, maintenance and storage of panels, wiring, and battery banks are now a safety concern given that more than 25 people a year have died in Australia alone just installing and maintaining them (cleaning them). This is only the roofing aspect of it. What about the production and storage of batteries, the materials and chemicals used to produce panels, etc...

Roofing claims more deaths worldwide than nuclear energy has by many orders of magnitude. I believe this bias is due mainly to fear and ignorance, and the contemporary phenomenon of zero-risk. We don't apply the same risk analysis to nuclear that we do to other fields.

An example of how this is coming to bite us back is the discovery of the benefits of certain germs after most developed nations embraced anti-septics to an extreme (hand sanitizers, strong kitchen and bathroom cleaners to name two). The biome and snot are in!

Even Fukushima was a confluence of old reactors, on a seaboard and a tsunami which claimed almost all of the fatalities if you allow for theoretically higher rates of thyroid cancer and others. Taking a middle position, or better a geometric mean of Greenpeace's and others maximum claims vs. the nuclear industry's playing down of casualties in the three (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) major nuclear incidents to date, you arrive at a very safe industry that has operated for over 50 years in over 30 countries.

Fission reactors that don't need water cooling would allay any need to be near seaboards or water, and their shutdown on failure makes them even safer with no reliance on an outside water source or power as a potential risk.

The number of students studying nuclear science tripled from 2004 to 2013, yet the labor statistics show a -4% job growth vs. environmental sciences 11% growth, or a 15% spread. The nuclear engineer job pays roughly 33% more. I still think it is our best bet to date, but I am not saying like others, just pick one. Let's keep at the alternative 'green' energy-producing technologies and nuclear, not either/or.
Immutability, mvcc and garbage collection (2013)
+1 to inoreader, I've been using it since the demise of Google Reader. Stable, full-featured, and great mobile apps.

https://www.inoreader.com/
Is Open Source Development Detrimentally Negative?
I really like Windows 10 on my Surface. But on my 4 year old Samsung with heavily customized Samsung-built software that controls much of the functionality of the laptop, I can't risk moving to Windows 10 and not having any of it work. And there's no chance Samsung will update it.
I imagine you will consider this book beneath even the level of "shreds", but since you asked... http://www.garethjones.org/tottlefraud.pdf
Ask HN: Whose name goes on a VCS commit when pair programming?
Sometimes a programmer and I will switch between driver and observer multiple times during a programming session.

So who puts their name on a commit in those cases?

If I'm approaching pair programming wrong, I would love to hear from those with better ideas.
That greatly depends on what kinds of things you code.
Golly, the comments on this article are pretty shrill.

Some part of me might almost wonder if it were a politburo astroturf team...