skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that employer-paid health insurance premiums are not taxed as income is a direct result of the wage-and-price controls established in the US in WWII.

"Employer-sponsored health insurance plans dramatically expanded as a direct result of wage controls imposed by the federal government during World War II. The labor market was tight because of the increased demand for goods and decreased supply of workers during the war. Federally imposed wage and price controls prohibited manufacturers and other employers from raising wages enough to attract workers. When the War Labor Board declared that fringe benefits, such as sick leave and health insurance, did not count as wages for the purpose of wage controls, employers responded with significantly increased offers of fringe benefits, especially health care coverage, to attract workers."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...
Yeah, if anything, the peak of "special pieces" LEGO was in the 90s.

If you want to complain about the current direction of lego, at least pick something that's still going on, like lego's increasing commitment to IPs. These used to be all licensed (Star Wars) but now there are a lot of sets that are on lego-owned IPs like Bionicle.

What there is is much less emphasis on traditional lego lines like "city". There is, if anything MORE availability of basic pieces at different prices. Other than size, why would you need lots of basic sets? The point is that they are basic.

Also, inflation adjusted, bulk purchase of lego basic pieces is historically very low right now, because it mostly seems to track the price of raw materials (mainly oil). I'm not 100% sure of this but I read someone making this case with some analysis on one of the lego collector boards.

Anyway, if you like plain, generic lego, this is probably the absolute best time to be into lego: extremely cheap basic lego in the constructor sets, very reasonable priced SPECIFIC lego in the bulk orders, ability to export from lego cad, the best range of technic parts and computer integration of all time...

lego is in much better shape than it was in the dark days of 2001.
This. Discovery is a rather unique activity that has a wholly different set of details / constraints / etc. Way more social and content driven. Every store & platform out there does its best to accommodate discovery (and sometimes succeeds), but this is secondary to things like maintenance/updates/cust svc, providing relevant product information, and managing transactions.

Steam isn't bad at discovery, but because they're not creating much original content and their UI is janky, they're also not that good at it.

Source: created comprehensive database of education technology products [1], and while we made best attempt at discovery, we learned pretty quickly it was secondary in importance to having comprehensive info.

[1] https://www.edsurge.com/product-reviews/
Would a computer not be honest that it couldn't feel, even if conscious?
I'm going to ignore the whataboutism you spew.

Also, Elon musk has done amazing work with electric cars, sustainable energy and space travel. No doubt about that.

But this is about Autopilot, a collection of driver assistance program. Not sure about OP, but my spite with Tesla is that they are pushing the above-mentioned driver assistance programs as self-driving features. This over-selling is going to kill people.

And for your information, lane keeping assist, lane driving assist, automated cruise control (which is pretty much AP1.0) have been present in several cars. Even self parking has been demoed by several cars. Add in automatic lane changing (which doesn't sound difficult to me), it wraps up Enhanced AP1.0.

Does that sound like a completely autonomous self driving car? Because that's what the public perception is like.
If you include them, the picture is still remarkably safe. How many years since a regional airline fatality?
Timing aside, the namesake for Berkshire Hathaway is actually a pretty striking parallel to Sears Holding and Lampert:

My first mistake, of course, was in buying control of
Berkshire. Though I knew its business - textile manufacturing - to be unpromising, I was enticed to buy because the price looked cheap. Stock purchases of that kind had proved reasonably rewarding in my early years, though by the time Berkshire came along in 1965 I was becoming aware that the strategy was not ideal.

If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the "cigar butt" approach to investing. A cigar butt found on the
street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a smoke, but the "bargain purchase" will make that puff all profit.

Unless you are a liquidator, that kind of approach to buying businesses is foolish. First, the original "bargain" price probably will not turn out to be such a steal after all. In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen. Second, any initial advantage you secure will be quickly eroded
by the low return that the business earns. For example, if you buy a business for $8 million that can be sold or liquidated for $10 million and promptly take either course, you can realize a high return. But the investment will disappoint if the business is sold for $10 million in ten years and in the interim has annually earned and distributed only a few percent on cost. Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the
mediocre.

You might think this principle is obvious, but I had to
learn it the hard way - in fact, I had to learn it several times over. Shortly after purchasing Berkshire, I acquired a Baltimore department store, Hochschild Kohn, buying through a company called Diversified Retailing that later merged with Berkshire. I bought at a substantial discount from book value, the people were
first-class, and the deal included some extras - unrecorded real estate values and a significant LIFO inventory cushion. How could I miss? So-o-o - three years later I was lucky to sell the business for about what I had paid. After ending our corporate marriage to Hochschild Kohn, I had memories like those of the husband in the country song, "My Wife Ran Away With My Best
Friend and I Still Miss Him a Lot."

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
> K-means is based on some quite wild assumptions - your data follows a specific case of the Gaussian distribution. Plus side is that the algorithm is relatively easy to understand and implement so it is a good starting point into clustering.

K-means is a non-parametric clustering algorithm, which assumes no underlying properties about your data. It is hard to evaluate the quality of a clustering algorithm without some clearly defined objective. In particular, k-mean's cousin in the classification community, k-nearest neighbors, actually is provably a a Bayes optimal decision strategy as k and the number of samples increases, regardless of the underlying distribution of your data (i.e., it is strongly consistent, see [0]).

> K-means can be levelled up with the EM algorithm

In fact, the k-means algorithm is actually a special case of fitting a mixture of k Gaussian distributions where all the Gaussians are isotropic (have identical covariance matrices with uniform elements on the diagonal, i.e. a scaled identity matrix).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-nearest_neighbors_algorithm
Small sample size warning: literally every one of the six people in the military that I know well has told me a story of a promise made by their recruiter that turned out to be a lie, whether in terms of money, their likelihood of being close to their family, their likelihood of seeing active combat or something else.
I always want to find an app to preview my design, get it!
If you define a foam as "a substance that is formed by trapping pockets of gas in a liquid or solid", a roti is absolutely a foam. Or, a foam subunit.

(When you make roti, it usually expands like a balloon during the cooking process.)
Ask HN: Good way to find out about best workflows / technology stack?
I have so many tech side projects I would like to implement. But I seem to struggle with identifying the right basic technology stack for my projects.

What are good ways to find out about currently "optimal" technology stacks and workflows in the tech industry?

Are there websites that allow users to share their tech stack / workflows with others?

EDIT: Typo.
Formal Analysis of the Remote Agent Before and After Flight [pdf]
Not really... I made marginally more in the US than UK but it wasn't a great deal. That said, I had a good gig in the UK. Worst case, it's not order-of-magnitude different, and besides: proximity to Europe and a culture of realistic holidaying makes up for it (and ... cheeky as it may be to say it ... co-working with people from around the world wins hands down on being stuck in an office 355 days a year with Americans).
You're right, anything can be monitored, but we shouldn't take that as a reason that we should lay down and accept it. You should assume that any sufficiently motivated person/organization/state can get access to your information. But what we should absolutely do is make sure that state actors and companies have to demonstrate that they are motivated to take that information. That they have to devote resources to getting it. We shouldn't hand them broad access to everyone's information just because any one person's information is possible to obtain.

But regardless of that point, your other argument feels to me like a discussion against the problems of mono-culture: we should all endeavor to have diversity of implementation, if possible. The more we can work towards federated standards and the ability to quickly pivot when someone loses our trust, the more capable we are of defeating attempts to undermine that trust. If we only have 1 implementation of signal and everyone uses it, then all an "evil" party has to do is find flaws in that 1 implementation. If we have 2 implementations, then some users are protected. If we have 1,000 implementations, and they all inter-communicate, then we have some hope that only some users are affected by each compromise. I'm digging matrix.org as a federated protocol, and I'm hoping that it takes root because it has many clients; an open, federated protocol; and the ability for me to run my own server.

I would advocate that even though we're relatively mono-culture on linux, supporting it at least gives linux access to the source code which would allow other implementations (anyone else keeping a close eye on Redox [1]? I know I am!). Support open protocols! Support federated protocols! I'll advocate that signal is a great, easy-to-use system for secure communication, and that the ideas of Signal are percolating elsewhere (see "olm" [2] the implementation of Signal's crypto protocol for matrix). But I would like to see stabilization in Signal leading to federation.

[1] http://www.redox-os.org/

[2] https://matrix.org/git/olm/tree/
I just stopped using `var` entirely, and now I almost exclusively use `const` everywhere unless I'm dealing with flags or counters in which case I use `let`.
I concur. But then I tried to classify Google projects in 3 categories and find for "obviously useless things that only exist so engineers can have fun", and I didn't find so many obvious things:

- Obviously productive ones: Gmail, Google Analytics, Android, Android TV, Maps, Youtube, OpenSocial, Chrome, because they all participate to "universally trackable users",

- Skeptical projects: Fiber, Flights, Google Scholar, TensorFlow, Chrome OS, GDrive, GApps for Business,

- Pet projects that may be fun but don't seem to serve as leverage: GCE (yes, their cloud solution), Google+, Go, Google Earth, Google Play/Music, Google Wallet, Google Glass, GGroups, GFinance, GTranslate, Google Fonts, Google Classroom, Inbox, Wave, Hangouts, Google News, Google Currents, Google Keep, Google Now, Wave...

Therefore... If they wanted to stay as lean as possible, would they have come up with the right list straight away? What makes products "obviously" part of the first list?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
If you reword the title to "More than Half of 30-Year-Olds Earn More Than Their Parents" it sounds completely different.
@photogrammetry You could've been kinder. If that seemed "weird" to you, You could've just ignored it and moved on, as the comment was harmless.

PS:Not to preach, but just saying.
Many other large brick-and-mortar retailers have spun up relatively successful eComm businesses (Target, Walmart, Macy's). While those aren't to the scale of Amazon, I really don't think this is an excuse.
I didn't mean to imply a computer would be dishonest! What made you ask that question?
Perhaps the reason you've seen this phenomenon everywhere is that the companies that don't do it tend to fail, whereas the companies that do tend to succeed and grow and hire people like you.
> I agree with you in principle but this is a special case. Mark Zuckerberg is is as close to bottled lightning as you get when it comes to his vision and leadership of FB.

Then they should have kept the company private. Once you go public, you have to play by the same rules as every other public company.
Lukashenko has to get around to it lol
Üvey Babam Erkeğim Oldu Samsun Escortlardan Enses İtiraflar
Interesting! Great to see people working on a more environmentally friendly blockchain.

What are the weak points of this cryptocurrency compared to Bitcoin? The white paper is very technical. Is it required that majority of stakeholders stay online and constantly take part in the network for it to function correctly?
I know very little of networking but I assume to perform a TCP reset injection attack, the ISP would need to rely on the IP address of the public onion routers. Now, why do they play around with the reset flag instead of just simply swallowing the packets directed at a tor router?
I think that is pretty common and has to do with that dying isn't concrete enough for our brains. Telling people to drive slower so they don't die usually is less efficient than making them consider spending months in a hospital bed and never properly walk again etc.

That said, that fear is largely irrational too since essentially no "helpless scenario" won't first have developed into an emergency. So you don't have to fear being helpless before there is an actual emergency. But you don't really have to fear emergencies either, since the far majority of emergencies (or even crashes) end well.
> Barring gross negligence or malice, most things go wrong for reasons other than the immediately involved actors.

Anytime I hear of systems failing, I can't help but think about Dr. Cook's paper on How Complex Systems Fail - http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...
Things only 80's admins and hackers might remember: similar to Expect, some terminal emulation + serial communication programs for PC's came with languages for automation, resembling Expect. Expect might have been inspired by that sort of thing.

I had experience coding in two of them for DOS PC's: ProComm Plus's ASPECT language ("Pascal-ish" flavored), and a C-like language called Salt built into Telix.

I mostly used the very popular Telix for my personal use, but a law firm for whom I did some IT contract work used Procomm Plus for connecting to various databases available over dial-up (e.g. local land title registry). I wrote a bunch of ASPECT code to automate their scraping tasks: log in, look up this and that, save in a file, that sort of thing.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procomm_Plus
I have been made to do this, I called the function wasteMyTime() and all it did was waste the user's time for a few seconds with a spinner. Still a little bitter about it.
My definition of "country" is having a yard big enough to throw a tennis ball for your dog as hard as you can, as far as you can, within your property, and not have it hit something. Just any linear stretch of maybe 150'. People in cities very rarely have that, unless it's some kind of billionaire hilltop mansion type situation. Many people can't even own a pet because their apartment disallows it.

Same thing would apply to shooting a gun on your property. If you can do it without the cops coming, you live in "the country" as far as I'm concerned.
Are you really asking whether you should play dumb on a technical question?
From the picture in the article "The Babylonian symbol for an absence of numbers".

Then that is not 0, that is null!
> it is not open source

Huh?

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android

I'd even argue it's free software - the team has managed to create some confusion about distributing modified binaries - with regards to using the servers Signal operates -- but have clarified that it is indeed ok to build your own binary from the source they provide, and use their servers.

I'm not quite convinced about their argument for official app store distribution and updates, but I can understand the argument.

> it requires Google Play services

I'm fairly sure the iOS client doesn't depend on Google Play Services. Sticking with an app store does require trust in the provider though.

Whisper System have made some fairly clear choices, and while it's perfectly fine to disagree, I think it would be best to avoid FUD.

It certainly strikes me as one of the better options for pragmatic secure messaging, that allows for a fairly narrow and reasonable set of threats (Google/Apple/Microsoft (possibly more than one of each, depending on your platform), Whisper Systems themselves, probably most state actors).

The other reasonable option I'm aware of (that make slightly different trade-offs), is ChatSecure/zom.im (where zom.im is a "friendly" fork of ChatSecure).
I mistakenly thought of the change as a software change, since I've yet to use the flag button.

It might be useful to tie changes in community standards to something concrete and trackable. Taking the detox week as an example, there would be a way to flag something and specify "detox week" as a reason.

That being said, can you give an example of changes in community standards on this site which effects cannot be tracked in software?

EDIT: Clarified scope of "changes in community standards" to this site.
You need it for doing what the OP is talking about.
Chill out man, no need to be so judgemental (in reference to you calling things stupid)
Some earlier discussion of the protocol itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/52qfwl/provably_s...
The reality is at BigCo there's always that one part or another part of the company that's fine to work at. There are a whole lot of other parts that are not. The trick is to find out what the good parts are and avoid the bad ones.

Maybe you just got lucky.
One explanation might be that the flat pieces snap between two top studs on any other brick, when laid on edge. This would not be possible with a different ratio.
Most transition effects where things are added or removed from a group of objects - without the visual cue, this can happen so quickly it's hard to see where the removal or addition happened. The tab bar in your browser is a good example.
I agree, it smells like monkeypants to me
Try to write more! Do it creatively so it's something that you enjoy. Have your friends read what you write and provide feedback. Writing helps you formalize your ideas and allows you to see errors you make concretely.
Maybe add a notice to the site header listing currently-running experiments. Apart from making it easier for people who don't read every post to keep up with rule changes, that'd emphasize that there's something out of the ordinary going on, and not the new normal.

PS: How do you feel about adding a "rationale" text box to the flagging process + some eventual feedback on whether moderation agrees with the flag/rationale? I basically never flag comments because I'm not sure I'm the same page with y'all.
As long as you're not doing type casting or any funny reflection, you can write that code and it'll be caught at compile-time.

I wrote a library [1] that does this in a readable pattern-matching way, hope you find it useful!

[1] https://github.com/jiaweihli/rematch
> but imaginary literally means not occurring in nature

I would be tempted to say "pictured", "in a picture".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/imago#Latin

But imago also has a lot of other meanings, and so "ghostly" and "conceptual" are also possibilities. :-)
They had a pretty good sale on men's shoes a few months ago so got some new ones. It is dead quiet though, and hard to track down staff, and looks like crap
Stability in worker incomes, while total wealth has grown substantially, means a lot of people are getting screwed. When you add in things like how health care costs are greatly outpacing inflation, it means a lot of people are really getting screwed.
I think you misspelled "Sheryl Sandberg"
You are generally right, but there is one super key distinction: despite being a "bad" business, Berkshire was throwing of real hard cash, albeit in decreasing amounts. Buffett used that cash to invest in Washington Post and buy See's Candies, among other things. Buffett never let them do any serious reinvestment in the textile business.

Sears, on the other hand, has been a cash consumer, not producer. Just look at the FCF numbers from the past 10 years:

-2,175 -2,378 -1,657 -1,438 -681 -707 -311 1146 495 977 931

There was some money at the beginning, but not nearly enough to justify a $20B market cap.

If you want to be like Buffett, buying a dying business is a terrible place to start. It'd be like someone idolizing Steve Jobs, so they go get a woman pregnant then abandon the offspring.
Car Becomes a Living Platform
Well, I hope you don't judge people for an accounting fiction.

Any treasury bonds held by the federal government (for example, by the Social Security) is money the government owes to itself and has no real-world effect. The only part that matters is treasuries held by private investors.

Less government spending in the past would mean lower government debt (owned by private investors) today. That's only real effect. You can blame people for running up government debt if you like, but might as well skip talking about Social Security.
I pretty much agree with you, but

> Also, how can a company give bonuses or raises to employees when all employees are already being paid what the value they are generating for the company is?

is a terrible argument. In the event that my boss determines that I deserve a bonus, I consider that an adjustment for mis-estimating my value when determining my original salary. If you pay me enough that you can't afford to pay out a bonus, then I don't need a bonus.

If you plan to pay out bonuses, given that the practical value of future money is less than current money, I prefer to simply have that bonus money added to my base salary from the beginning.

I realize that for many people there is a psychological factor involved; getting a bonus feels good, in a way that getting the same amount of money spread out throughout the year does not, and there is some value in that. But the ability to choose one payment option over the other should be open to a potential employee during negotiations. You should be able to offer the option of a higher salary in exchange for no possibility of bonuses.
This is true, but I wouldn't say the title is misleading. Especially when earning more than your parents is part of the American dream, that is social mobility. Which is discussed.