skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Most sex workers agree that their safety is improved dramatically by having the business side of it out in the open. And, there have been studies on sex worker safety that indicate strongly that legal prostitution is safer for everyone; it also reduces coercion when it is not underground (women don't need a pimp, if law enforcement is on their side)."

I did a lot of research on that in college for some legalizing prostitution essays. The research I found, both scholarly and anecdotal, totally supported this. The worst thing I found is that there were many incidences of rape or abuse by clients, pimps, or even cops that were made easier to get away with via the stigma of prostitution. Just bringing up the details of the crime was enough to get themselves arrested. In some cases, judges tossed it out since they equated prostitution with asking for it.

So, taking action like this isn't just taking a stand against the act of prostitution: it's also supporting worse crimes to happen to prostitutes and others around them. Not even necessarily people participating. It can be just a caring person that runs afoul of the pimps that want the status quo to remain for specific women.
Yes that's exactly it. Glad you like the approach.
More drinking water than it needs, but not more agricultural water - they could grow a lot more with extra water.

This method could help them do that.
The CEO has money, connections, and the thin veneer of respectability. The issues involved are not so simple and emotive as the ones relating to sex and minors.

You know... the usual bullshit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12641948
E-mini S&P Futures Day Trade Shorts
Yahoo is in full self-destruct mode this week.
Looking around on the internet it sounds like the cost of the aircraft accounts for about 10% of the cost of a ticket. Frankly, airplanes sound downright cheap compared to the cost of staffing and fuel. Doesn't seem like the right place to start looking for cost-cutting measures.
The vice lobby is apparently kinda weak.
Either they didn't know, or are trying to spin the story a certain way
An extra $79 turns the Oculus into a room-scale VR system
Someone could wonder if all this is being triggered by people with an agenda.
Only in tech would late 30s be considered old.
This is a dangerous movement.There are documents from Visa and I believe Mastercard about how to push for a cashless system, which would be in their best interest. Imagine having to pay a 2% transaction fee on EVERYTHING. Water bill, 2% more. Gas, 2% more, food, 2% more on top of the 2% to 3% inflation that grows each year. Etc. etc. etc. A lot of "futurist" have talked about how cash is archaic but being stuck in ONLY electronic banking, and your just closer to global slavery.
FTC Proposes Reforms to Patent Assertion Entity System
There was an out-pour of articles on this topic after MyRedBook closure, e.g. http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Closure-of-prostitution-...
You can definitely see where this is going. My first thought was the same: 'we need eyetracking for foveated rendering anyway, so we can get realistic eyes for free', and if you can do that, you can track the eyebrows and muscles around the eye (doesn't need great fidelity), and I wonder if that gets you all the way to the rest of the face as well? Can you smile/frown without it tugging on the parts closer to the eyes which the future headsets can observe?
There's no way to say "proved" about anything but mathematics that meets with it's usage in that context. It's not overly strong language, just used in a different context therefore with different meaning.

I trust an insurance company and healthcare provider because they are adversaries. Insurance vs insurance, insurance vs provider, provider vs provider. They're being driven with competition and ultimately greed. If one of them does a bad job, another that's doing better will replace it. They're all playing with their own money.

A government bureaucrat tough doesn't really have any skin in the game. They might be driven by good natured ideals, but I think that's far too vulnerable to compromise. From politicians being bought by lobbyists to a revolving door between industry and bureaucracies personal greed leads only to healthcare providers and government colluding for their own individual benefits to the detriment of the citizen who has no option but to pay taxes and get the services of the single healthcare system.

In theory a benevolent dictator is the ideal form of government, but in reality the people with power just aren't angels. You can use competition and greed for the greater good if you do it properly, you just have to recognize what you're doing and how to manipulate human behavior for the best outcome.
Because, get freaking real, there are 267K FTE at WF .. versus backapage probably hires what, maybe a 100 or so?

If some % of 267K people are not committing fraud, than I'd want to arrest the CEO for doing some terrible brainwashing.
OK, well, I think it's a little unfair to characterize that as a "rejection." But my thinking has evolved a bit in the past five years. The difference between zero-worlds and many-worlds is the difference between taking a personal point of view or a God's-eye-view. God can see the many-worlds, but I can't, so it makes more sense to me to assign a privileged status to this world, the one I live in. But then I have to make my peace with the fact that this world is not as it appears to be, and I do that by thinking of it as a (very high quality) simulation. But that just my personal approach. Reasonable people can (and do) disagree.
Of course they dont mention that this all could have been avoided by legalization of the industry and registration of the workers (and maybe consumers too). Prohibition lead to lots of underground bars, moonshine and other unintended consequences.

Imagine if backpages only had certified legal workers? And if there were stronger fines for using an illegal/unregistered worker? I would imagine someone who wanted to use an escort service would be quick to get a legal one?
I've found dividing up the support among engineers helps this a lot. Lack of empathy is a big factor here. Having engineers understanding customer problems also leads to easy consensus and easier cross collaboration among teams. Would love input contradicting this. I'm still learning a lot myself but this has worked for us.
I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining.

I can't help but wonder what the revelations about Palmer Lucky's ties to racist "shitposting" brigades bode for the future of collaborative VR spaces. I guess at least this time we know we're wading into a cesspool, all utopian forecasting aside.
This seems to be a self-policing crime.
Is there any source for your partition estimation?
> I'm not certain what one means about it not being easy to immigrate

That demonstrates willful ignorance of the situation:

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/02/22/172622...

Doing things the legal way is basically impossible for many, many people. We should make it simple and easy for law-abiding people to come and work in the US.
More comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657872
I don't think this is necessarily a wrong thing; I feel like really ground breaking/challenging development forces you to understand what you are building the farther you go along.

It's always ideal to have perfect code the first time it's written, my experience is that this is never going to happen unless you have perfected what you are building to the point that you have code generators/boiler plate code to cover most of what you are building.

With that said, very interesting article. Thank you for sharing your experience, it is very eye opening for me.
CTO roles at companies vary. Some end up doing "technical stuff" as well as business. How large was your team that this was a problem?
From a Lisp POV, the only thing wrong with NewLisp is the name.

It flouts McCarthy's wish that no language be called just Lisp. Well, okay, it's not literally called Lisp; it has the "New" in front. On the surface, it seems to be sticking to the letter of the wish. Does it conform to the spirit, though? Is a common English adjective enough? Is "New" a sufficient qualifier?

The mere prefixing of "New" looks like it's claiming to be a new version of something that is just Lisp, unqualified. A "New Lisp" is plausibly something that was "Lisp" before, and was then enhanced to create a new version derived from "Lisp". Lots of projects get rewritten, or otherwise revampd and called "New Whatever". But NewLisp certainly has no such lineage.

One historic dialect was called NIL which stood for "New Implementation of Lisp". But it went by the name NIL, with the acronym just being an explanation for that name (as far as I can tell).

Change the arrogant name, and you will not hear another criticism from Lisp programmers. Make it LutzLisp or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is if it is called LutzLisp; it's not that type of thing that's claiming to be a new, improved version of Lisp.

Breaking, or skirting a sacrosanct rule is now how you play along in the broad Lisp family.
For the same reason Hollywood promotes "Glamour", "Celebrities" and fawns over them on the red carpet. Gotta feed the machine with the bright-eyed and the impressionable.
There are a large number of medical companies outside of the US as well. Additionally governments encourage research in general through patents and subsidies and provide direct funding. Not to mention that a lot of research happens at universities. Additionally many of these companies are located outside of the US.

Ignoring all of that just from a purely financial perspective, the amount of money spent on health care simply can't be explained through research, both in quantity and when it comes to the reality of what people actually pay for which treatments.

Medical research doesn't explain why people think twice about calling an ambulance or go as far as taking a taxi or driving themselves or a loved one to a hospital in an emergency. If you do that in Germany, you'll get a lecture and will be considered an idiot who has unnecessarily endangered themselves.
On Civilizations and Sex
Small Tetris clone which is written in Assembly
People are offering their house for free and bnb is managing those transactions for free. title should credit homeowners morebthan airbnb, IMO
The vast majority of our human experiences are already imaginary, if you count books, movies, televisions, and even song lyrics (about heartbreak, hope, depression). I think people will always strive for more variety and breadth of experience, and that will always include road trips, hikes, visits to new cities, and whatever else you might be worried about losing...
To what end? Yahoo is dead and being purchased by Verizon already for an agreed upon price. I guess they could back out, but that seems unlikely.
I wondered about that dog on the couch... Still, pretty neat (and, come to think of it, a little less worrying than giving Facebook access to a webcam in my house.)
This is great news. The only way we will have a chance to start doing things right as an industry is if there are serious consequences for doing things wrong.
300something. I was too involved in the projects themselves (which is what I like(d)).
I may be reading it wrong, but it seems to me that Pitt it more interested in doubling down on the new default.

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2016-Ju...
Doesn't seem fair to charge per capita. Maybe by GDP? The gross world product is ~$78T. If spread over 15 years, it's about 8.7% of output yearly.

Or maybe by share of total carbon produced historically?
In the Craigslist/Newmark case, what one of the State Attorneys said was, "We don't care about a benefit. We'll just keep prosecuting until all of the sites are shut down."

Newmark made the same case as the parent commend, but that was the last thing the last thing the law wanted to hear since they are prosecutors, not social workers.
Is there a way to notify Apple about this like a petition or something? Lots of us would be happy to help
I started dabbling in compilers early on and just got increasingly into them and their associated tools. It's still fun watching a new optimization rumble into life:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6176

(Yes I know some other compilers do that already.)

It's fun knowing how it all works from the source code to the executable.
I'm extra-suspicious of this lawsuit because of the opportunistic timing. He was fired in January 2015, more than 1.5 years ago. And yet the lawsuit is only filed now during Verizon's process of closing its acquisition of Yahoo. Whether or not he has a case, his motives now have an antagonistic taint because he no doubt timed this to maximize the PR damage and his chances of getting a quick settlement.
Latest unemployment figures for VA show a 3.9% unemployment rate with 152,545 unemployed in the state.
That's a project management issue, not a software engineering one
Link to the paper cited by the video regarding effectiveness of colormaps:
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8667395/evaluati...
The USDA claims tomatoes cost from $0.92/lb (canned) to $3.29/lb (grape and cherry tomatoes) on average at retail [0]. No idea what retail produce margins are like, but even if we assume they purchase at 10% of retail cost, that's approx $200-740 per tonne revenue to the grower.

If you assume its towards the higher price, and the grower sells at 10% of retail, that's over $1 billion over 10 years (the length of their contract).

[0] http://ers.usda.gov/datafiles/Fruit_and_Vegetable_Prices/Veg...
> is that mostly correct?

Mostly.

> also, how popular is this theory in the physics community?

Not very. The fashionable way to think about this stuff is something called "decoherence" which really amounts to the same thing but phrased in different terms.
This is amazing. I want VR so bad.

On a lower note, I wish there were real games rather than this kind of things, but I still find it amazing.
Uber May Be Making Too Much Money
Beyond Deep Learning – 3rd Generation Neural Nets
Mostly because there are people with opinions that differ from the hn/reddit echo chamber.

Nobody denies that yahoo failed, but most people also believe that it's fate was sealed the day it refused to buy google, and that she did about as well as anybody would have.

...but also: she'd get a 60$ million bonus if fired, and considering that yahoo has already lost 90% of its former value and is being sold of, people probably stopped caring.
Not totally unlikely https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/report-verizon-wants-1-bil...
I remember reading about things like this in "Behold the Pale Horse"...it seems possible but I doubt we'll ever know what's really going on.
Ask HN: How to favourite HN posts for my keepsake?
Shame...you could've just dismissed the popup and not missed out on an interesting article

But I don't know that until I've already given up the goods, do I? This approach to life, the universe, and the Internet simply doesn't scale.
There's idealism on both sides of the argument.

On one hand, there are those who believe that conducting these arrangements in the open is safer for all involved parties.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that sex work can never truly be consensual, because even if consent is given, a sex worker may have felt pressured to seek this life because all other choices available to them to make a living and attain food and shelter were sub-par or nonexistent. This argument supposes that given a different, idealized circumstances free of such pressures, few people would choose sex work.

I find this argument very similar to the idea of age of consent, in which society declares that people below a certain age are incapable of informed consent, and similarly, the widespread societal taboo against suicide, which implicitly suggests that no rational person free of undue pressures would consent to ending their own life, therefore anyone who commits suicide was pushed to do so by serious factors that impaired their ability to properly consent.

Finally, there are those who just want to be 'tough on crime', and actions like this fit the bill at first blush, while letting it operate would be construed by the same population as inaction.
It is such a shame that people downvote comments like this. There are issues with Google quite aside from the surveillance ones, like limited support of foreign languages (try finding a Chinese script in a known calligraphic style, for just one example). The more demand for independent hosting and subsetting exists, the better the open source tools will become. Let's not enter a period where fonts go the way of email - centralized providers with CDNs and obscure backend processing facilities are the only ones that can do a good job.
> “We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work. Our performance-review process also allows for high performers to engage in increasingly larger opportunities at our company"

Ok so has that worked out well for Yahoo? Clearly it's been enough time by now to do an evaluation of Yahoo practices looking back and say something like: "Yeah thanks to these great management practices we have reconquered market share / are the new exciting place where everyone wants to work / or we lead this revolutionary research"? It ended up being owned by a phone company in the end.

So if Yahoo is a failing company, what they did there, will be associated with failure. It seems they effectively moved the cause of promoting women in technology fields backwards. When someone will say "we should find a way to promote women more" ... "Oh, right, Yahoo was heavily into that, yeah that was ugly, the lawsuit and all...".

It is a bit like the crazy person advocating for your favorite language or framework, it's nice to have a fan, but because they are crazy, they are pushing everyone away with their behavior.

> as well as for low performers to be transitioned out.”

"Transitioned out" ... there is an almost a positive ring to it. "We've reached out to them, found their pain points and helped them transition out to a new stage". Is that how everyone talks now? Or is it just me who finds it grating.
Anyone who was unkind to Ellen Pao should really be rethinking themselves about now.

Edit: Hn thread: why is diversity so important?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576806

Me: if diversity is not important than this lawsuit is a joke and HN should be laughing at this lawsuit.
Growing tomatoes one time under cover had a huge problem with white fly, not an unusual infestation, but a very stubborn one. While using the natural kinds may be better, pesticides are often a necessity in that situation. Your comment was completely on target for many commercial producers.
"The larger point is that companies are more complex than “a single most important metric.”"

You dont hear this as often as you should. Also, he made some interesting points about the various metrics and why they are important.
I make a point of not learning the new framework du jour. (Back in The Day it was the next UI frame Microsoft was putting out.) If I keep hearing about it for a few years, I figure it might be worth looking into. I starting writing new sysadmin scripts in Python instead of Perl after I kept hearing about it, for instance. Other than that, I tend to learn on a need-to-know basis. I feel like that has led to little churn in my knowledge. But then, I also try to avoid working in areas that have high churn, which has led to my experience being in areas of low churn.
*Verily Debug Project (title is currently "Google Debug Project")

Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences before the Alphabet split-up) is a sister company to Google. This isn't Google, and it's not code, but a project to help eliminate mosquitoes by a bioscience company.
...and most importantly, fertilizer

(this is covered in the article, but the headline forgets that part)
Submissions have a "favorite" link at the top, for individual comments you have to go to the comment permalink by clicking on the timestamp, there you'll find the favorite link.

Link to the lists are in your profile (and public!)
Try looking into or messing with actual engineering of software instead. You'll get similarly amazing things. Here's a few:

http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf

http://www.methode-b.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/dl/thier...

https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nictaabstracts/7371....

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-192/paper08.pdf
What's this in reference to? I don't really follow the manglement part of tech as close as I probably should.
Very true, but that applies to basically everything written on this site.

I'm actually semi-serious with my comment (Mayer would probably make the perfect CEO for Twitter), but nobody in a decision-making position will ever see it.
Wow. I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but that was pretty cool.
> You can't have exponential growth forever.

We don't. Look at the more developed nations.
If the article is a good preview of the case, it does seem to be bullshit... The mechanism by which this discrimination supposedly happen was the stack ranking feedback system.

Now I believe stack ranking is stupid and somewhat cruel. But I don't see how it allows more discrimination than other grading systems. The lawsuit also doesn't claim intent and it'd be quite a stretch to assign liability to the CEO for hard-to-prove unintentional side effect.
my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 has taken to crashing the phone so hard when I try to load Snapchat (and this is the only app that does it) that holding the power button down for a minute has no effect. To restart the phone I need to have usb power into it.

Why Snapchat? and why only when loading my friends stories, which is the only reason I would open it.
Will we eventually see resistance to the bacteria the way that bacteria evolve to be resistant to antibiotics?
I use that timetravel trick as well; I never thought I was old (I like getting older so far; so many doors just open that were closed before), but yeah things to tell your younger self; do not hurry so much. Make 10 year+ plans when doing things. I always hurried thinking something would end; I have been running companies since I was 15 and, for instance, the first company I co-ran with my uncle, made educational software for MS-DOS and later Windows 3.11 and then Win95 etcetc. I was in hurry because I thought first MS-DOS would go away and then that Windows apps would go away because web. The software I made then sells well still; it's now over 25 years old... Why did I hurry/worry?

Things I thought that would end, like the CMS market 16 years ago (a market my company thrived in) didn't end. They became bigger. If I would've not hurried, I would have less stress at the time and probably be running on a larger scale than that company is doing now. You cannot stand still and for some parts there needs to be a sense of urgency but it doesn't change that much in most markets. Currently I use that to tell my colleagues we need a 10-year plan, not just a 3-5 year plan.
This may turn out to be a silly question, but how does a pest infest a closed system in the first place? Do they arrive in the soil? Do they fly in the door?

Could there be ways to mitigate or prevent the mechanism of infestation in the first place?
Great questions. it is lidar data.