skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This pattern of waste echoes throughout British government, national and local, Thatcher onwards. That's when we stopped governments being able to do stuff.

Companies like Serco, G4S, ATOS and Capita have all supplanted "failing" public services by either promising to be cheaper or replacing another company that submitted a wildly inaccurate bid and themselves under-delivered.

I highlight "failing" there because many of these failures aren't organic; a government has broken them and then threw them under the bus.

After a few years of substandard services and a daily ragging in the Telegraph, the magical tenets of tender and PFI are just too tempting. We paint this picture of the lean bulging muscles of private industry, but it's the same problems with added layers of obscurity and greed.

Worse is the transition from cooked-in-house school/hospital meals to having them driven in from a factory 200 miles away is you replace so much infrastructure that there's simply no going back. You used to have a kitchen full of ovens and hobs and staff who knew how to operate them. Now you have a room full of freezers and microwaves and the cheapest possible immigrants interfacing between the two. To reverse that requires hiring and training and investment. Who's going to invest in that when they could just keep selling them [awful] ready-meals?

Or you sold your land to a PFI so they could give you a hospital. The catch? They get super high rents and "maintain it" at huge expense. After 20 years you've spent more than twice the amount it would have cost to build and maintain it yourself. It's loan-sharking.

The tragic thing here is that many public services are the ultimate embodiment of lean. They do so much with so little and are forced to be transparent. They are people so there's obviously some variance but we've spent so long villainising these organisations that we've forgotten how good some of them really were before it was too late.

This country needs to find a way to start fixing this.

If I were king for a day, I'd start with a new nationalised housebuilding scheme. That would raise revenue (means tested rents, fair price sales), create jobs, lower poverty and homelessness, create new markets for local services.
I don't understand your complain...

I can boot a current day kernel with init=/bin/sh just fine.
Depends.

Many people come to realize their mediocrity after spending enough time under the sun. Accepting this realization and learning to be happy with it takes time -- especially at the beginning.

Edit: Formatting
Folding Paper in Half (2015)
Authorities wouldn't do anything about it until it became a big problem. On top of that this stuff is all hosted overseas.
Could you share the Twitter bookmarklet with us please? It sounds very useful.
+1

I'm German, too, and I only ever saw these switches in contemporary settings UIs instead of checkboxes.
A vast amount of the consumers in this case are still woefully ignorant of technology at all, but that is changing, the younger customers are more demanding of tech companies and have d loyalty than any group before, meaning these companies will have to start changing or be replaced by ones using more open frameworks.
I miss those days where you could easily connect with the developers in a small tribe like that. I grew up chatting with Epic/DE devs and modders in those days and it was a terrific experience.

Now developers are either beyond reach or stick with mediums where it’s more like a sounding board for them to talk at you than for both of you to have serendipitous discussions.
Yes, but I'm going to guess that that runtime exception is still possible. Record accessors are disambiguated through type inference so if their type is ambiguous it will still fail.
Not if they have circular references... (I agree that Rust makes it difficult to do this accidentally)

Also, remember mem::forget() is not unsafe

I'm pointing this out because I don't want people to have wrong expectation of Rust. Rust doesn't prevent memory leak. Rust doesn't consider memory leak to be "unsafe". Even the Rust team themselves have pointed this out multiple times.

Somehow people are still repeating that Rust can rid you of memory leaks. And I'm downvoted just because I'm pointing out facts. Sigh.
"Mediocrity" is such an ill-defined concept. As you advance out of being mediocre, the pool of people you compare yourself to gets smaller, and you still end up feeling mediocre. When you get to Elon Musk levels, I would assume you switch from comparing yourself to those you know and instead compare yourself to historical figures (e.g. Henry Ford) and perhaps still feel mediocre.

Then add in the Dunning-Kruger effect (the real one, not the popular misinterpretation of "you're so dumb that you think you're smart") and judging what exactly mediocre means becomes even more difficult.

But in the end, sure you can convince yourself that the negative feeling of not achieving as much as you might have been able to isn't worth losing sleep over, and you might end up 'happier'. You can also try to leverage the feeling to stop yourself from wasting those 50+ hours rewatching Game of Thrones and instead putting that time into becoming more like someone who you perceive as being less mediocre than yourself.
I think you're mistaking someone who's happy but ignorant of their mediocrity, and someone who's aware of their own mediocrity but learned to still enjoy life despite the knowledge of their own condition.

I'd say many people are aware (in some form or another) that they are in the middle of the Gaussian curve, but live perfectly "happy life". If such a thing exists, since I've yet to encounter someone "normal".
I recently wrote a blog post about annual leave (vacation) entitlements around the world. [1]

I cannot believe that the US does not have a federal legislation on annual holidays, but instead leaves it up to the employers to negotiate that with their employees.

My wife once applied for a remote working position with a quote famous US company that actually wrote a book on remote working. They offered her a 'generous' 10 days vacation a year. Here in Australia, full time worker are by law to get 20 days annual leave and 10 days fully paid public holiday leave per year as a minimum.

My feeling is that if there is no minimum quota set, then it is open to pressure from above to ignore and abuse it.

My tip? Move to Iran or Cambodia ;) [1]

[1] - http://blog.hrpartner.io/holiday-leave-around-the-world/
There's no assignment to the „m“ variables that would make your algorithm work in the general case.

im4w1l's strategy is just:

Player i returns (i - [Sum of the other players' suits]) % 4

(With i ranging from 0 to 3)
What’s next for Uber drivers’ lawsuit?
Google still lurks in self-driving race with Uber and others
PokemonGo in HTML, JavaScript and CSS – Part 2: Orientation and Directionality
"Cars are great to go between cities fast, but inside cities they should behave like guests"

No, especially in north american cities where you can walk few places, cares are another form of transit, like anything else.

Relatively few people actually ride bikes.

"Pedestrians, cyclists and public transportation are the most efficient mode of transportation inside a city" this is completely false in most situations, especially in North America.

You cannot reasonably walk 5Km to work every day and back. The vast majority of people live far from work.

Even with cities that have good public transit, it's not optimal in tons of cases.

Cars - or things like them - are going to stay. They are not going away.
As has been noted elsewhere, 'unlimited vacation' is usually at best an aspiration, at worst a scam.

Has anybody tried asking up front what the average number of days actually taken is? And if you asked and then took the job - were they telling the truth?
Peoples answers here are good. Just to add you also want to watched out for pooled sick vacation leave. It incentives people to come in when you're sick and spread colds, norovirus, flus.
It's absolutely important to your well-being and happyness to understand when something is enough and to be at ease with what you have.

Hedonistic tendancies teaches you to want more and more, you never appreciate what you have because once you have got it you want the next thing. It becomes a zero sum game and you've probably just sacrificed a whole heap of your precious time and health to achieve it.

Many people fall trap to trying to beat others in what they have / what they do.

They see their friend has a bigger house, they want a bigger house.

They see their friend had a big weddding, they want a bigger wedding.

They see their friend earns X a year, they want to earn X + Y a year.

Remember, there are 7 billion people on the planet, you will probably not be the richest ever, so learn to be happy with what you have.

This is not to say do not strive for improvement, just allow yourself to be happy.
This sort of article should really serve as a wake up call to this community.

There was another article here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12329255, where some comments mentioned that people should retrain once jobs become available for consistent automation.

Lets take the simple example of the machine that picks apples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I

Typically immigrants do this work, low educated immigrants. They do it because they can't get any other work in higher skilled professions. Sure they could be a driver, oh wait soon that will be autonomous. They could work in a warehouse, oh wait Amazon is doing it's best to disrupt that. They could be a cleaner? Oh wait, companies like Roomba and Dyson are working to disrupt that.

The point I'm trying to make here, is for all the poorly/low educated people and lets be really, seriously honest are in the tens of millions. What are they going to do?

I've traveled all over the world, all the continents. There are segments of the population that can't read, can't write, can't even grasp basic maths. They are the ones who depend on these low end jobs.

Are you going to tell me with a straight face they they can re-train, go back to school and work in STEM? It's just not feasible. Also, who is going to pay for all these millions to retrain for years. Remember, they'll probably have to restart their education, basic maths, basic science, then college, then university. That's what 7 years? Who will pay for their living expenses for them and their family?

There is a ticking time-bomb coming soon. Where we'll have an OMEGA man type of situation. All sorts of jobs will be automated and people won't have anything to do.

What are the solutions?

1) Do we implement 1 child per couple policy? To lessen the burden on the state?
2) Do we provide free schooling with a zero-tolerance on NO child left behind? So that they can go on to STEM fields?
3) Are there enough places in STEM fields for those who do retrain to move into? Is this another thing for government to throw money at?
4) Does society move from a capitalist to a socialist/communist system? But what happens when government runs out of money?

What are we going to do?

Just saying people will retrain is just utter folly.

There is a time-bomb ticking and some of you just don't realise it.

Want to know the result of no jobs, low educated populous, government with no money, socialism failed. Oh yeah. Greece. How's that doing for the last 10 years? It will be like that for another 25.
Ok so your specific lighting system integrates better with Echo than with OK Google. That says something about those combinations, it doesn't say much about Echo itself.

Like I said in the comment you responded to; on its own the Echo is pretty borderline whether it's useful at all, and it can't do many things your phone assistant can.

My point being; just because your combination works with your Echo and not your phone assistant doesn't mean that Echo is a device most people should buy.
The "auction price" isn't actually a price. It's just the number of bids so far, and it's meaningless. They're just advertising it as a price to confuse and market.

Them saying "this tablet is up to $11.42" just means "there have been at least 1142 bids for this tablet", (assuming "penny" is "one cent", I never could learn the weird American names for the small currency).
I like having accrued annual leave and sick leave for the exact reason that they are tangible numbers that I can reasonably say I own. If it was "unlimited" as you say, it seems more like the company or team owns them, and your expected to conform to expectations on their limited use.
Like so many things, it comes down to culture. If you're offered a job somewhere with an unlimited vacation policy, before accepting ALWAYS ask at least two different people how much vacation most people take.

I've worked at unlimited vacation companies where nobody took more than a week per year and others where most people took at least four weeks (generally non-consecutive).

I've also worked twice at places with finite vacation policies where as long as you were responsible and productive they'd let it slide (or wouldn't even count) if you took a few extra days here and there.

I've also had friends who worked for large companies and got four weeks of vacation tell me they couldn't take more than a couple sick days per year anyway because their boss had to approve vacation dates. Any date they proposed was denied because the "timing" was "bad" for their projects.

Pick your employer for its culture, not its official vacation policy.
> I cannot believe that the US does not have a federal legislation on annual holidays, but instead leaves it up to the employers to negotiate that with their employees.

It's odd considering US federal employees have leave policies that most closely resemble what you see in the rest of the developed world. It's the private sector that seems to be in a race to the bottom in the last few decades.
A friend I used to know actually got reasonably skilled at getting stuff from penny auctions. I personally witnessed him net gain from the exchanges (and bought some electronics from him for very cheap, since he had several of each at that point...)

He never shared his methods, but did say that one of the most important considerations is the target audience of the item in question and at what times they are likely to be bidding. You can glean that information by continuously observing many ongoing auctions.

The basic strategy was "hold off until people have stopped bidding, then put one bid down. If it doesn't work out, go have a picnic in the park and try again later."

This may have been before such sites offered pre-configured bots.
7 Commendable HTML5 Frameworks That Augment Responsive Web Design
Uber has agreed to pay up to $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit which resolves a major challenge to its business model by allowing the ride-hailing service to keep its California and Massachusetts drivers as independent contractors.

The lawsuit had claimed that Uber [UBER.UL] drivers are employees and thus entitled to reimbursement of expenses.

The case against Uber had been closely watched in Silicon Valley, as other companies in the on-demand tech economy share Uber's reliance on independent contractors. The class action had been scheduled for a trial in San Francisco federal court in June.

"We realize that some will be disappointed not to see this case go to trial," said Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney for drivers.

However, Liss-Riordan said the plaintiff drivers faced significant risks of losing if the case moved forward, particularly because a federal appeals court had recently agreed to review an order allowing Uber drivers to sue as a group.

Nothing about the settlement prevents a future court, or U.S. labor authorities, from deeming Uber drivers as employees, she said in a statement.
I don't think all unlimited vacation policies are scams. At my office we get told we need to take more vacation if we don't take at least 3 weeks. And I have never once seen a vacation request denied.

It sounds like you've got a job where they are using unlimited vacation as a way to limit vacation even further instead of using it to promote a great work life balance.
I'm intrigued, which one of these problems was fixed? Unfortunately I still have to use 7.8 so it won't help me currently but in the long run it's good to know.
Your comment quotes mseebach as saying "Transferring state between devices? That's my butt." I think you left Cloud-to-Butt turned on in your browser. That's not always a good move when reading HN.
"Cycling is a well-established form of transit that many people participate in,"

Many do, but it's very small about 2%. In SF it's 4$, NY it's 1%. And overall in America - it's negligible (outside of cities it's impractical).

So - bikes are a distant 4th after cars, public transit and walking. It's not going to change.
Story time: A couple of friends and me played on a competitive Minecraft server for a while. You could form factions, build protected bases and compete on various player vs player events. The last part didn't interest us at all, since we were all a bit older and went there to relax after work. So we did all kinds of other creative things like automated shops using redstone. The server also had an in-game currency which you could only obtain by mining. One day we got the idea to do a penny auction to finance the expansion of our protected area. So I quickly put together a Flask based site that parsed the Minecraft client chat log in realtime. Other players would send me in-game money which would result in a chat message my locally running python script would pick up. Everyone could then see the auction happening in realtime on the website (Example screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/yg2V3iS.png). It was really successful, everyone had fun and hopefully learned that you should never bid on penny actions :-)
hey thanks. I was half worried it was a terrible comment.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (2015)
Ben Sherman Men’s Victor Chukka – Brands New Trends
Tell your boss he's a liar, name the company, and get out, is what I'd like to suggest.
It's not that kind of ignorance, it's that you literally can't assess the quality of a product before buying it and testing it. That information is not available. As others have pointed out, UL and CE impose certain categories of pre-sales testing to guarantee certain safety properties. But there's no guarantee that the product will actually work in particular ways and continue to do so.

You can't expect that everyone should, before buying a product, perform their own accelerated-life testing and code security audit.

(I think we've yet to have the statutory rights lawsuits where people's IoT devices stop working after a couple of years and they claim this is a "manufacturing defect", which under UK law must be warrantied for six years.)
Did this as a course on Coursera with a group of friends. Highly recommended.
Disclaimer: I'm core NixOS developer

It's great to see such articles as they dive deep into psychology when it comes to new technology. It's really hard to unlearn.

It takes effort to realize that the promised gain is bigger than the pain coming from doing what we're used to doesn't work.
Top 5 New Tech Trends Ruling the New York City
> that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.

You have just restated the problem of consciousness, except as an assertion that it doesn't exist.

The problem of reductionism is that it doesn't stop; just as there aren't really points of view, there aren't really any chemicals, and there isn't really such a thing as (classical, let's say) information. All of these things are "just" emergent phenomena.

The explanations which made "aether" and "miasma" obsolete are beautiful, unexpected at the time (in a trivial sense), and of course, not supernatural.

I agree with you about the afterlife. However consider this: if the universe is infinite, isn't it likely that there will be copies of you which arise spontaneously, in all conceivable circumstances? The older you get, the less likely you are to be in a place or time that is causally connected to your birth, because most causal chains involve your death. (This is just a specific case of a Boltzmann Brain[1])

Of course, this sort of nonsense thought experiment runs afoul of the Measure Problem [2]. But this is precisely the kind of problem that I hope the explanation of consciousness would help to resolve.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology)
I'm not really well versed in the language, but from what I've seen it takes the whole 'everything is an object' concept seriously, which I think is kinda fun.

For example, booleans are an object that can have two values: True and False. There's also two methods on the boolean object, ifTrue: and ifFalse:, and they both take a code block/anonymous function as the only argument. Both True and False override these functions. True's version of ifTrue: calls the code it's passed, and False's version does nothing (and vice-versa for ifFalse:).

For example:

a < b
ifTrue: [^'a is less than b']
ifFalse: [^'a is greater than or equal to b']

They're implemented more or less as a standard library package rather than a language construct. You could potentially extend the boolean class with different implementations of ifTrue and ifFalse, maybe reversing the logic or logging the branch taken or whatever. The functionality can be changed dynamically.

I think it's neat when a language eats itself like that.
They are not a scam, they are an accounting feature.

Your problem is not that you have unlimited vacation, it's that you are working for a company that is taking advantage of you. They could (& probably would) do the same thing with limited vacation policies.

Leave as fast as you can and let your peers know why you did it.
I've mentioned elsewhere that a profit driven media leads to sensationalism and emotion driven content over objective fact telling.

That is the one thing that I can think of that is particularly American but there does still seem an inverse instinct within the US, where someone in say Alabama, who is as likely to be touched by a terrorist as they are by aliens are more likely to be a doomsday prepper.
There's a lot more to these sites than this article goes into. I'll say right up front; these sites are total scams who target poor people who usually have a poor understanding of economics, statistics and math.

One of the features of these sites is that they will put up credits on the site as an item for bid. So the person who spent "$3500" bidding might have won a "10,000 site credit" auction at some point for $190.00 "winning bid" where a bunch of people actually spent "$50,000" on it. Which in turn might have had some site credits involved, etc.

These sites have been around for a while now and the fact that they've never been regulated is a great sign of how dysfunctional our government is and its inability to protect poor people from being ripped off.
I'm sitting here in munich, can do JavaScript, Java, DevOps and IT-Architecture. And I would like to be productive again after I came back from Bangkok 2 month ago. But I really don't want to waste my time with all the HR processes. Every company anew want new programming tests. And recruiter didn't helped at all in the past.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/germanroberternst
Also, you'd have to be thinking of mediocrity along a single (or very few) dimensions. The more features of a person you look at, the more likely you'll find they're special in some way. I thought we'd established that in [1]. :-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287
How is walking not safe?