skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is a tendency in this field for folks to believe tech is about as close to a meritocracy as it gets, and that unions or even a trade guild would just hold "the best" back.

You don't have to be arrogant about your own abilities to realize that promotion based on seniority would privilege longer-tenured workers over better, lesser-tenured workers.

That doesn't just hurt the best workers -- it hurts anyone who is above the average.

Promotion based on seniority is a common feature of union contracts, so it's a valid concern.

Some people like seniority-based promotion because it can reduce discrimination in promotion decisions. For example, a woman could be promoted based on seniority even though her sexist boss might prefer a less-qualified, less-tenured male candidate. That would certainly be unfair, and seniority-based promotion could prevent that. However, the tech industry is currently mostly men, which means that any female employee who joins a large company will have at least a few decades' worth of men ahead of her in line for a promotion, no matter how good she is at her job. Seniority-based promotion would actually entrench gender diversity problems for at least 20 years, rather than solve them. The only way it would have positive effects vis a vis diversity would be to impose it on a workforce that is already diverse but has discriminatory managers.
Are you sure the employer provided health insurance is a notable cause of the disaster of the current system?
That's really comparing apples and oranges, but the se and sel gas models are $26k and $28k respectively.

The sel egolf is $35k with $10k in discounts. So technically you get more for less.
There's plenty of things in this industry that are PR disguised as analysis.

Look at security breakdowns of security flaws from outside firms that end with 'you don't want to get fucked by this, buy our services'
Uhh, no, I don't remember that. I remember this:

> The war itself played a major role in the growth of health insurance, according to a March 2002 history of health insurance benefits from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank that examines employment-based benefits. Wages had been frozen by the National War Labor Board amid a shortage of workers as many potential employees went off to fight in the war. Employers sought to get around the wage controls in order to attract scarce workers. Providing them health insurance was one way to do that, EBRI said.

> "During this time, employers petitioned, and were granted to have benefits, particularly health benefits, not be considered part of wages," Stephen Blakely, the director of communications and managing editor at EBRI, told us. "Congress agreed to exempt health insurance benefits from taxation."

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/oct/30/ja...
Akademgorodok, a city in Siberia that Russia that Russia is trying to turn into a startup incubator.
IIRC employer-based health insurance was a side effect of WW2 price controls. Unions organized support for the PPACA (Obamacare), even though it didn't directly affect their members.

Nobody is saying unions are perfect, but corporations and plutocrats aren't going anywhere, and labor is the only countervailing force.
That's already happening. I've witnessed people trying to intimidate minority folk here in the East Bay, yelling 'you're going over the wall!' unprovoked at people on the street for example.
I'm from the midwest (originally). The problem with any trade deal is that the middle class was told that it was going to be good for them and it wasn't. Yes, you can say they should have thought about it and they could have seen that trade deals even out labor costs but nobody told them that.

So today, any trade deal is viewed as "here we go again" no matter what the actual content says.
I wonder if some "AI Gen 3.0" machine learning / cognitive machine system could have caught this, without human intervention?

I just yesterday attended a presentation by a ex NSA guy (who's of course pitching his company Adatos, so grain of salt) who claims you could feed the raw data in and the pattern will be found.
Why can't you let the feature be opt-in?

Your iOS app effectively turns useless when choosing "Never". You can't do anything other than booking a cab. No access to account information, ride information, anything else.

----

Yeah, I get what it is when you say:

Improving "suggested pickup" locations

If your app watches me 24x7, then it'd be able to predict pickup locations better. Good job. It can't get creepier.
I am not talking about grid->car->grid, I'm talking about a slightly more advanced version of time-of-day charging for cars: grid->car. That's a smartphone app, not rocket science. Tesla's API is already capable of supporting it.

All studies of "what happens when electric cars are a significant % of electricity consumption?" involve this. It's super-useful because it's storage with no cost: it only cycles batteries that would have been cycled already, just at a different time of day or day of week. The key thing is that a long-range car doesn't have to be charged to 100% by morning, every morning.

As for your complaint that I didn't respond to your entire rant, sorry. You started by claiming that "no one" was doing something, which really isn't true except for some bizarre combination of things that appears to only exist for you. You seem to think that the German government is wrong for pointing out to German car-makers that it's stupid to ignore California's mandate, even though you admit that California has a reasonable smog-based reason for having a mandate. Next time that you think that "no one" is doing the right thing, consider that you don't agree with most people about what the right thing is.
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Yes, this is a major issue that people seem to be missing.

Sugar is used to bulk products. It's cheaper than almost all other ingredients.

Often you add salt to stop it getting to sweet.

If people wanted smaller products they could just eat 40% less so there will have to be something to replace it.
There's nothing to stop the competition from doing the same.

The real issue is absolutely zero consequences for invasion of privacy.
great minds and all.
"for people who want to feel special and intelligent all the time."

Who doesn't want that?
Actually this is good policy, professionally speaking.
True, but if professional athletes and Hollywood actors can be in unions so can hot shot web devs. Plenty of meritocracy (ugh I hate that word) in those fields.
Then drag the pin a bit further, or even crazier, say "hey can you drop me over there?"
Would you be willing to share information about what % of Uber's revenue is accrued from monetizing user information?

EDIT: BTW, did you hear from your support that there are users who aren't pleased with the new feature?
Artificial intelligence, revealed
> I'm not going to try to defend our reputation [as a shady company].

Someone well above your pay grade probably should. As far as I can tell, Uber's business model is psychopathic levels of regulatory and psychological arbitrage.
AI controlled Mi-24 (FlightGear) flight simulation
I am a Python/Django guy and have worked in organizations where it is used extensively.
I did complete the challenge successfully. After successful completion of the coding challenge, had an HR call. I was told by HR that I would be getting information about next rounds in few days.
And bam! a reject! That too without any feedback(even though I asked for it)
I know the product is awesome, and you guys are doing a great job; but I was a bit disappointed for not getting the reason of reject.
Big discussion last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12944464

Apparently moissanite just came off patent protection last year so it is an even better option now than when some of those resources were created.
Not letting individuals deduct it directly created the system that removed health insurance from the consumer market, which removed health care from the market, which created the meteoric rise in costs.

Anytime people are removed from the cost of a thing, the price goes up. Housing, education, healthcare. Even buying groceries people spend more than twice as much with a credit card vs cash.
I use 25% more butter plus cream instead of milk + fine shredded cheese, heat just enough to melt the butter and beat up with a whisk before mixing up with the noodles.
At some point in the near future, maybe 1 year, maybe 10, anyone with a spare couple million dollars will be able to buy a machine to grow diamonds indistinguishable from mined diamonds, defects and all. No one will be able to tell at all, and the market will be flooded. Prices for mined & manufactured alike will crater.

There is no future for mined diamonds.
Incredible maturity at your age - Google does a great job at finding talent.
> Uber's infrastructure is completely incapable of handling that volume of data, because it was never designed to handle it.

That is completely irrelevant. The powers that be can siphon off the data as it comes in. The danger is in receiving excess data in the first place, making yourself a more enticing target for collection activities.
Say hi to my friends over at limelighthealth.com

They are a startup built and started by health insurance brokers. If you are a startup with under 50 employees, go to the founders there. They all still hold their brokerages, and they are startup founders themselves. I can't speak for them, but I am sure they'll know how to help you make the best decisions for insuring your employees.

After-all, they get it.
I'm still reading :)

Sorry for this, I'll look into something to make this easier for you in the article.

In the meanwhile, we published some high-res versions of the maps on reddit, which hopefully are better for you.

Electric grid: https://i.redd.it/2nkdq2bx101y.jpg
Pipelines: https://i.redd.it/mu945myovz0y.jpg
Airports: https://i.redd.it/m9p0mpy2wz0y.jpg
Ports: https://i.redd.it/2khvrwe6201y.jpg
Bridges: https://i.redd.it/enf1rtz9z21y.jpg
What I mean is, please don't flippantly Nazify HN threads when obviously nothing good can come of it. It breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to introduce classic flamewar topics (and what could be more classic than that one).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This has to be a goldmine for divorce lawyers.
The problem is when the laws inevitably start including clauses that make it illegal to talk about the bad things that are done.

Because... terrorism?
> Individual users' data is very closely guarded internally. It's immensely difficult to look at user data without specific access. Overwhelmingly, this data is queried in aggregate and fed into machine learning systems. The risk of abuse is exceptionally low.

For now. You haven't mentioned how long this data is kept, which means I can assume "forever". This means that a future change of policy, an acquisition, or a merger can expose this data to a variety of third parties (not to mention the obvious possible exposure to governments).

The reasons you have listed for gathering the data are not sufficient to offset the future risk to me. Moreover why should I do unpaid data acquisition for Uber while bearing all the risk in case the data is exposed? If you want higher detail location information, do what Google did and send out cars with sensors.
I use to work there before I started my tech company.
And I'm switching to Lyft
at some point 15-20 years or so ago De Beers started laser etching logos on the diamonds for exactly this reason.
I usually don't get into the office until after 10.
The government is the highest-status and highest-paying employer in Singapore. The education systems are extremely strong, they send students all over the world for higher education, and those students usually return to Singapore to work for the government. The fact that their Prime Minister was the Senior Wrangler [1] at Trinity College demonstrates a lot about the overall way their government works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_(University_of...
My favorite DM album is Infester's "To the Depths... In Degradation" :)
> things are locked down _pretty damn tight_ around sensitive data

Commenting, to save this little gem for the inevitable time when Uber gets hacked. Again.
While this is a neat technical trick, it does appear to require that an attacker also be able to inject a script tag with a specific source of the attacker's choice. Which feels like cheating, kind of; for a web application that's pretty much the equivalent of "well, assume you already have root on the victim's machine, once you have that you can do THIS".
In fairness you can access the app, it's just the little hamburger icon is grayed out making it seem like you can't access it. I was able to click it just fine even with the "ENABLE GPS" overlay.
> Foreseeing a long and costly political battle, many labor unions chose to campaign for employer-sponsored coverage, which they saw as a less desirable but more achievable goal, and as coverage expanded the national insurance system lost political momentum and ultimately failed to pass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_Unit...

See History
Can individual users get access to their own data? Can they take this data with them, similar to Google's takeout?
Something out of a sci-fi horror novel.
Just lost me as a customer.
Yes, it was warmer.

Please see helpful chart:

https://xkcd.com/1732/
And what's next in the path of a very successful engineer? 10 years down the line? 30? 40?
I wish iOS forced all apps to offer "Always/While Using/Never" for location info. It's bullshit that Uber can refuse to offer the middle choice.
If NSLs are included under its "national security" category, Uber said it has not received any such requests at the time of its last Transparency Report. https://transparencyreport.uber.com
Hmm, convolution is perfectly good operation to run on wave forms as well. In fact the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution) shows the operation on functions which would correspond to time-domain wave forms. What is the point of converting everything to pictures and then using 2D convolutions when that step could have been skipped entirely?

Converting to pictures is unnecessary. It makes the processing harder. The pooling should just happen on segments of the wave form instead of the fourier transform (frequency-domain) picture spectrograms.
Disclaimer: I hold a small amount of stock (and lost a lot of market value) in a silicon-carbide gem company.

Yep - silicon carbide is very cool. It's weakly birefringent, which can be noticeable in larger gems, but the refractive index is larger than that of diamond, and the dispersion is greater too.

No matter from whence your gems come, the nuclei were largely forged at the heart of a star, same as everything but the hydrogen in your body.

The only people to whom I recommend natural stones are those with a connection to the earth or to a specific place. Geologists have a soft spot for natural diamonds. When considering an engagement ring for my now-wife, I spent a lot of time looking at sapphires from Montana. Only the risk of shattering them in a tension setting kept me from going that route.

The final thing that nudged me into synthetic stones was looking into the open-pit Cripple Creek gold mine. The environmental destruction we create in search of precious materials is considerable. Synthetic stones are made from carbon, sand, and electric power, all comparatively easy on the planet.

Diamonds are cool. So are lots of other choices. Look around; it's neat.
Imagine you are born into a glass room. Others are already in the room. Initially your focus is within the room. You don't really notice anyone outside the room. But eventually your mind starts to imagine other possibilities. Looking around, ,none of the others are trying to break through the walls, even though they can see others outside those walls. You ask about this, but are told there's no point - the walls are impervious. You start focusing outside those walls. At some point, you decide to have a crack. Yet no matter how you try, the walls are indeed impervious. You stop trying. You accept your lot. Are you happy? No. Would you rather it were different? Yes. Are you doing anything to try and bring about a difference? No. It's futile.

I could also add, that very few on the outside are truly looking into the glass room. Some will be aware of it and its inhabitants, but of those most are uncomfortable or even offended. For some those feelings arise when considering the inhabitants; for others considering the glass room itself. "I did not create the glass room", they think. "I did not put those people there". While they may feel some sadness at this state of affairs, they do not at all see themselves as causally connected to the glass room or its inhabitants.

Some of the inhabitants of the glass room may try and communicate their presence and their dissatisfaction to those outside the room. But largely, those communications are either misunderstood, or ignored. Many of those that tried to communicate conclude that the minds of the "outsiders" are as impervious as the glass walls of the room itself.

To those on the outside, it does indeed seem as the glass-room dwellers have lost any fight. "How can we help those that won't even help themselves?". "Knowing nothing other than the glass room, perhaps that is where they are most suited to stay. They seem content enough."

Perhaps the walls contain an unknown but fatal flaw? The walls seem able to absorb vast quantities of anger without exhibiting any faults. Yet upon reaching a (very high) threshold, that pent up anger may cause the walls to suddenly shatter. I wonder, how much fight will the glass room dwellers will show then?

Edit: grammar fix.
That's a fair point, and I've lived in NYC briefly to know that it is indeed annoying to see the driver do circling around in traffic to get exactly to the door.

You can use AI to solve it, or you can give the user power to tell the driver that he/she is willing to work a little bit. A simple button may have been suffice
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Support FLAC audio codec
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> That view that it it's "terribly depressing to be broke" and all the despair the poor in America feel because they can create no value could only be thought up by us smug hacker news software creators.

I think that's the view that's easy to come up with for smug HN software creators.

I've lived in poverty while working a minimum wage job, and while it was only for a couple years, it utterly destroyed my morale. There was no reliability; nothing I could count on. If something happened; if I got sick or if something broke down, then I would have had to go to a loan shark. Not because I was stupid or because I didn't understand that I'd never be able to pay the loan back, but because there would simply be no other option.

Long story short, I escaped that situation largely through luck, but I try to keep reminding myself of what it was like in the days where I had to double-check my bank balance before agreeing to go out for Chik-Fil-A.
It's good that you found it enjoyable, but something worth keeping in mind beyond the fun-and-games atmosphere is whether you are in agreement with the company's overall direction and goals (and the fact that you are essentially contributing to that effort by working there); it reminds me of this article with a very much opposing view:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689897
Well, what if it's done randomly? (like, by software that controls the machine that grows it)

Or, modify the growing process so that it has a greater element of chance to it? (this is likely multi-dimensional)
Automated drone lands on a car moving at 50km/h
Well it's the same company that creepily gives me a code interview in the app because it knows I go to a software company couple of times a week and pushes a job ad.

Uber has a lot of sensitive information regarding users. Who goes where and when. This in the wrong hand can be very disastrous. E.g Trump to Uber: "gimme list of all people who to to mosques frequently. No tax for you." Uber: "Here you go. Just don't tell anyone. "
Mmm hmm[1]. Though this article is decidedly bearish on VR.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
If you do any of these in good faith then you wont run into any trouble.

* If you aggressively price to extract almost all of the value of your product or service because of an unnatural (i.e. not market based) advantage then you're price gouging.

* If you purposefully operate at a loss with the intended path to profitability being raising your prices later then you're being anti-competitive. We want to reward companies for real efficiency, not just who happens to have the largest VC war chest.

* If you charge the same as your competitor in good faith and don't find yourself in the first bullet because of collusion then there's no problem.
The Kyoto protocol considered cut tree carbon to be released back into the atmosphere.

There is plenty of land that used to have trees, but we now have 7 billion humans and their associated support organisms. https://xkcd.com/1338/

We can get more efficient with our land use, though the benefit would likely be a more stabilized ecosystem rather than reversing climate carbon.
Without actually knowing anything about the subject my guess is that the very cheep synthetic diamonds you heard about were / are intended for tools, (Where all that they care about is the hardness, so they can be small, yellow, and messy)

Also, I do know that you can get synthetic ruby for ~$1/carat on ali-baba. (I actually bought a few)
Golang’s Real-Time GC in Theory and Practice
No organization keeps their records in fire proof safes dude. They keep them in basements and warehouses and the trunks of employees' cars. I sell and implement backscanning services for a living. I've seen it all, trust me.
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Curious to know the infrastructure before 1970
Agreed. In this case we're talking about the FBI so I assume it's an issue for federal courts.
Yes, but I don't work on this project specifically.
If your new cereal favor doesn't increase sales, wouldn't the supermarket find a brand that does? Otherwise, the super market isn't optimizing shelf space.
ECS is free in that you pay only for the EC2 nodes running your containers -- there's no need to host ECS or do scheduling on your own hardware to use it. It's also Availability Zone-aware right out of the box, making sure the distribution of container instances is optimized for durability. Finally, it's fully managed. No one needs to maintain or upgrade your ECS implementation.

Granted, there's a lot of advantage to building on top of an infrastructure that can be installed on any hardware from any provider. However, we're not talking about rewriting your applications if you need to move away from ECS; it's all still the same containers. Going from ECS to Mesos or Kubernetes when needed is a matter of writing new config files.

It's a very attractive proposition for small teams on AWS who are trying to spend minimal time on ops.