skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Here's the evidence, because I'm sure you'll have difficulty scrolling up:

> I look forward to the creative way you will dismiss this as well.

Please cease the personal attacks. I've been nothing but professional in tis conversation.

> https://ilsr.org/walmart-charged-predatory-pricing/

The case in Wisconsin was settled out of court, with no admission of wrongdoing. The case in Germany was about pricing products too low to be legal, not about doing so to eliminate competition or to raise prices afterward.

The case in Oklahoma is interesting, but I never heard how it concluded and couldn't find reference to it in a brief search just now. I remember being especially interested in that when it came out because Crest Foods had alleged that David Glass, then CEO of WalMart, went to their stores with a scanner.

At any rate, none of these cases are any different from the original one in the 90s where the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that WalMart had used "loss leaders" but that there was no evidence that they had done so for the purpose of bankrupting competitors not that they had raised prices afterward.

Your assertion was that WalMart lowers prices until competitors are bankrupted then raises prices to take advantage of its now-monopoly status. I have never seen evidence for that - and I've looked quite a bit throughout the years.
Whenever the physical world intrudes on the illusory "virtual world of computers", the man behind the curtain is observed in its less than superlative aspects and we're less prone to attribute OZ powers to "software".

Software /is/ magical in many aspects. But its own inherent magic has never been anything other than sleight of hand sort of magic. Even then, software magic borrows from the glory of /insanely/ complex physical machines, and various wondrous features of Nature itself.

One case in point was when Moore's Law and economy collided and the practice had to ramp up on concurrency and deal with SMP. A bit later (and still on going) we're ramping up on distribution and dealing with CAP. In the former case, the illusory 'indivisible' platform was seen to have a sort of geography. In the latter case, the illusory notions of linear 'time' and smooth 'space' was smashed.

OP's remedy for a software-driven world's ailments is software literacy. But the physical head poking through the curtain should make it clear a large subset of these ailments have to do with physical things, such as computing devices, infrastructure, access to energy, and even softer concerns such as legal and political cover for making, providing, and operating software.

Imagine if every single person was a world class chemist and biologist. Would we be able to do away with drug companies? You have that amazing molecule all figured out -- do you have the physical capability for actually realizing it?
map and filter return iterators. This is easy to fix (list(map(...)). reduce is at functools.reduce.
If you really have a 75% conversion rate once you start talking to people that is outstanding.

Next you should validate your intuition that spending relatively modest amounts of money on adwords will double or triple your flow of customer leads. If that hypothesis holds up under real world testing then you have a business and need to transition as quickly as possible! Even if that means taking on an investor.

In most b2b environments I have been exposed to a 1 to 3 week wait time is not a deal killer if you have something they want/need.

I think I might deal with customers in the wait time transparently. I would tell them something like the following.

We are growing like crazy and our backlog for setting up and training new customers is about 2 to 3 weeks. Please be patient with us. We believe each new customer needs some personal attention up front to make everything go smoothly and ensure that we are set up to serve you well over the longer term. Obviously we won't start billing you until you are completely set up. If for some reason it takes longer than 3 weeks to get you set up we will give you a free month of service at the end of your first year.
Maybe I am incorrectly conflating Economics with the Economy. I understand your point about economic forces producing an outcome that is less optimal due to our failure to consider present and future effects of our decisions.

My point is that if you look at this from an economic point of view, you should be able to figure out whether or not it is good or bad (or at least know what information you need to figure out if it's good or bad). See my other comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108119
Good point of view, and indeed procrastination is the opposite of evolving.

However "I am unsure we are evolving" sounds like paradox. Isn't a version 2 of anything always "evolving" by definition? Otherwise, what's "better"?
HN can be pretty bad.
I dont see the point Im afraid. Any service that gets popular then by default will send you to tourist traps due to popularity or effort by the trappers. Its self defeating at its root.
Amazon Fresh already exists[1], but they deliver instead of you picking it up.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=Fr_Gr_Sft_Nv1_learnmore?ie=UTF8...
Thank you for clarifying. I mean, even being off by $90k would have been plenty wrong enough to justify your statement.
What's the opposition to simply writing a Maven plugin versus tossing a bunch of extra logic in your build configuration? I understand there's some extra ceremony around it (you have to write a new project, publish the plugin to a maven repo or install it in your local .m2) - but I find it's a much cleaner and reusable solution than having a bunch of custom tasks dangling around build scripts.
The store will have video footage of everything... maybe their sensor AI will eventually distinguish between intentional and accidental spoilage.
No problem. It was so egregious and over the line that it really stood out. Your response was also really eye-opening, a thing that all of us who benefit so much from OSS needed to read and understand. Thank you for making it.
It doesn't look like the phone is actually required for anything after the check in and really the only hard reason to want a phone there is to have a convenient link and another data point to help track people through the store. They could do the same tracking with cameras to associate you and the items you've pulled off the shelf. Add in RFID in the checkout lanes and you've got a pretty easy system that accommodates dying phones.
Your government may enforce these interactions if it so chooses. I'd prefer my government did not, and leaves the choice of where I get my social interactions up to me.
Not all counties in all states have or make public this data. In fact, I think sold price is not reported to the county in many (maybe most?) states.
Thank you so much, that's gratifying to hear! At this point we're evaluating 300-400 submitted stories every month when our submission window is open, so creating a single issue takes a decent number of person-hours. I'm happy that you're enjoying the result.
I also run my own startup, but I have way more repos (and way larger repos) than you. What you've accomplished is certainly impressive, but it is nothing compared to what I have accomplished.

Oh, and I work on all of my projects every month. Without tooting my own horn, I am by far the most intelligent and capable developer on my team so I need to maintain a level of excellence that my coworkers can strive for.
Why? You're already recorded pretty heavily in every chain store you go into for loss prevention.
What is hilarious about "general problem solving skills," is that when you actually master something with instruction, the person who teaches it to you tends to tell you the reason something works in a specific way is because of the general principle at work. Actually doing things gives you general problem solving skills.

A lot of people believe, "everything happens for a reason," but people with practical experience don't need to believe that because they know everything happens for a reason: it's called "the cause."

Apprenticeships are the most valuable education anyone can get, but the practical aspects fly in the face of pseudo-intellectualism that passes for modern non-STEM scholarship.
Why is it that GC technology is so hard to transfer from one language to another? I'd kill for a FLOSS implementation of Azul's GC, or a good small-heap-specialized GC for .NET.

It seems far too often we run into popular languages whose growth has stalled due to their GC, or features that have been held back by GC, or whatever. And then other languages have several different GCs with different characteristics that can be swapped out with a simple CLI flag.

Is it something that is deeply and strongly coupled to the language structure? Is the parameter space for tuning just too large to practically swap one GC for another? Incompatible algorithms? Maybe one of those situations where you get 80% of the way with an ounce of effort, but to get to 81% takes years?
Fair point, but this post title should read "donutloop/mux – A lightweight, fast HTTP request router for Go", then :)
Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it's Political Detox Week on HN.

For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.

Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they're like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don't mix.

Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.

Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.

A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.

Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.
Poorly coded JS applications will experience issues. Sounds like an acceptable downside.
I looked my house up on Zillow and it is showing an estimate of about $80k. My homeowner's insurance has it covered up to $75k, the county tax assessor lists the FMV as about $50k, and I owe $37k on it. My own estimate is about the same as the tax assessor's, and I wouldn't ask more than $50k when it comes time to sell it, given the work it needs to get it up to the Zillow estimate in my eyes.

Looking at other houses in the area, my house appears to have a much higher perceived vs actual value, based on Zillow estimates alone. For example, my neighbor's house on Zillow is supposedly worth $90k, but I'd put it closer to $100k based on her lot size, house size, overall condition, and age of the house (I'm friendly with my neighbor so I know a little about her property's history and makeup). In other words, her Zestimate is a bit lower than what a reasonable person would put it at, whereas mine seems greatly inflated. Perhaps this is due to Zillow "grading on a curve"; it would seem odd if one house was rated at half the value of its neighbors, so mine gets brought up to the lower end of the average range even though it doesn't deserve it. That's purely speculation on my part though.
Redfin is indeed awesome, but they are only available in select markets where they have a brokerage.
This.

Mainstream journalism has to regain credibility.

The first step down that road is producing credible journalism, a difficult but necessary cost the industry is going to need to swallow if it expects to survive.

The alternatives are an expansion of thought censorship from the mainstream networks to its bubbling alternative competitors.

I understand the urge to misrepresent the world to garner public support. I really do. But nature abhors a vacuum. When the information available to the public is obviously compromised it will be filled by something or someone else.

The response to that isn't to censor alternatives and continue the misreporting. The solution is to recede from propagandistic instincts, and provide the kind of analysis you want to be recorded in history books for providing to democratic deliberation. If people really understand what's at stake in issues, and what powers, people and industries has what stake where, and when they understand issues to the point where they can make discernible political decisions - be they about representation or directly on issues - rather than being emotionally coerced at scale by every media platform above water; then, and only then, will the "information war" the State Department has been waging will really be won. It won't be won by the State Department, but by the people. And it will be for the people and by the people.

Truly: the alternative to this is to continue down this folly road of doctrinal misrepresentation of the world to the American people, and to play whack-a-mole with every narrative that challenges the useless and ill-predictive emotional appeal whose vacuum is being challenged.

(I speak as an American about my country).
How long until I can pay for access to a hacked BMW portal and do this to anyone?

Connected cars are as much a liability as an asset, maybe more so.
It feels good to think automation doesn't eliminate jobs, but one thing is for certain, if it merely displaced them into higher salary jobs, no one would ever automate because it would eliminate profits.

At the profit levels usually seen in retail supermarkets, you can't stop paying all those people minimum wage and suddenly start paying them software dev salaries without an enormous hit to the income statement.

"won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?"

Essentially these stores are already smart vending machines stocked by humans occasionally at night. In the long run that might be where fresh food comes from. "Go to the vending machine and pick up a head of lettuce".
I'm in this boat now: engineering PhD 5 years ago, well-published at the end of my PhD (sufficient for a faculty application) but instead created a startup to commercialize cancer surgery tech I invented, startup folded beginning of this year and I'm still unemployed after sending out several hundred applications. For each 100 targeted applications in industry/gov't I've sent out, I get around 6 responses, and 1 interview. It's soul-crushing. There just aren't many jobs out there that require a PhD, and for the jobs that don't require a PhD there's a stigma associated with having one.

I enjoyed the work leading to my PhD and the time spent at the startup was educational, but I have to conclude that pursuing the PhD was overall a mistake. I like the idea of the diversity of the sciences better reflecting the population at large, but I'm very angry that expensive education for a career with lousy prospects is being advocated. Considering the career outlook, poor pay relative to demands, and the disproportionate burden of child-rearing placed upon them, I see avoiding a career in the sciences as a rational choice for anyone, especially women.
PCPartPicker is the a very unique product with a great community and I've benefited quite a lot from it in the past and hope to continue doing so. Thanks a lot for making this.
haha, not really. that's just semantics, different words, some mixed concepts that generally mean the same thing as established models.

the SV they look for is just marketing glitz. Silicon Valley is as corporate as they come, and arguably even as conformist as the old guard if not more.
TIL politicians are the most efficient ways to solve political problems..
Prepositions are often lower-cased, even in titles.
You just have been 'rewarded' for your interaction with the platform. Thank you.
No, economic forces are not completely in our control, not in any meaningful sense of control. The whole human agency thing is IMO mostly bullshit; faced with a modern economy, we have very little agency. Free will is a cool concept, but drop the prices in your store by 10% and everyone will come to you instead of your competitor - that's how trivial people as a group are to control. And companies are all about exploiting this.

So yeah, technically if you, and me, and everyone else agreed not to use Amazon Go and stick to our regular grocery routine, mom&pop shops would survive. But that doesn't take into account the fact that coordination is a super hard problem. One that's essentially impossible to solve for a group larger than a dozen people without creating some strong external incentive structures[0]. On the other hand, a company like Amazon is in a position to unilaterally change the incentive landscape. There's no consumer agency to talk about here, anymore than we talk about agency of sheep being herded.

--

[0] - that's also why every society, as it grows, invents structured forms of governance.
Not sure i buy into that. Sounds a lot like sales talk.

Be interesting to see how they compare with these guys:

http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

and, afaik, for enterprise, sas hdd still leads ssd in performance price and endurance.
How your startup can leverage production-grade infrastructure
Dawn of Artificial Intelligence – The First Congressional Hearing on AI
On the Wrong Side of Algorithms - Biases and Discrimination in Machine Learning
Virtuix Omni Refund Program – No Omni for Non-US Citizen, too sad...
Aside from the buyer, who can pay for his own appraisal.
Erlang and Multicores [video]
Homeless, but already with a job in finance/trading. Not quite what people think of as homeless. Still a good story, but a bit forced.
I thought Elixir was already able to talk to Ruby (and other languages) through it's built in Port module?

http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/Port.html
Oh. I have to admit I ignored the video and thought the comment was about the "How does Amazon Go work?" paragraph on the page.
Ask HN: Who is using a self hosted analytics system?
I'm so used to SASS based solutions these days like Mixpanel, GA, Kiss Metrics, etc. But with everything happening over the last few years in regards to privacy and security I've been looking into self hosted.

Is anyone else considering the same? I know this is standard for companies like Amazon and Facebook, but what about everyone else?

If you are using a self hosted setup, what is it? Custom built, open source, etc?
This would be great if they got to keep the same salary.

Now they're just plain out of work. Hooray?
Ask HN: What is your hardware/garage side-project?
If have personal blog about it please share it.
Just to pile on the praise, I've learned more about the C language reading Redis' source code than I've learned from two books, a university course, and dozens of blog posts combined. Keep doing what you're doing, it is an inspiration.
Why does calloc exist?
They could do like gas stations and charge a hold just whenever you enter the store then finalize the transaction whenever you leave. That'd solve the problem and if it was going to fail you'd just never be able to enter the store and you'd just see a warning message about your CC not being valid.
Part of me says that you are correct on all of these points. However I think you went too far on 3.

Experimentation does not always follow theory in science. I would argue that many of the great discoveries of physics in the 20th century followed directly from startling results of experiments conducted at the end of the 19th century (the photoelectric effect for example). I agree that there seems to be an awful lot of experimenting going on and that hardware and large datasets have helped tremendously but there are also many researchers poking and prodding at deep learning theory [1, 2].

So from a glass-half-full perspective we have rapid (sometimes iterative) experimentation coupled with yawning gaps in theory to explain surprising results. In other words, the opposite of previous AI booms and a big reason to be optimistic despite all the hype.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.3831v1.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08225
So every news website ever.
Germany has a minimum wage, too, and apprenticeships are exempt :-)

Extra incentive.
> Is HN really that bad?

I recently had someone here say I should be given "a prison sentence of several decades" for working on Rust. And no, they were not joking.

To be fair, the comment in question got flagged off the site, but the point remains that it very much does happen here.
I am saying this only half jokishly but because Sublime Text meets all the needs?
Wait, gamedeception is no longer around?? :(
Open source is dead. The cloud has killed it
Chordify is (equity) crowdfunding and you can become a shareholder
>E.g. do the organisms dissipating more energy have better chances of survival?

in general, no. E.g., a child with a high fever will dissipate more energy than a child without a fever over the same time period. who is more likely to survive?

We can even consider a specific type of dissipation that an organism uses to store memories (longer lifetime of memory = less reversible = requires more dissipation), there's no guarantee that the memories stored will be useful for survival. storing a memory that lasts 100 years costs dissipation that could be better spent elsewhere for an organism that typically lives 1 week...

but with appropriate restrictions on what is meant by dissipation, organism, ... the timescales involved, the driving ... then the reverse statement can be true "more likely evolutionary outcomes" <among all possible trajectories of configurations of 'organisms'> "are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there.”
The original Leap Motion was awesome. But there was no adoption of it. It would have been great to see it included in laptops, for instance. Just my opinion, this is because, well, the same reason there are all sorts of arbitrary names for command line switches. The people that could build this already have something that works for them, so why spend time building out a whole new interface for other folks, average folks. Same reason why OSS has been great for programmers, not so great for consumers. Majority of the effort has gone to tooling and platforms, not to the non-technical user side of things.
This is my understanding too, his choral works are many. They were part of the Bach family factory though, IIRC, so might not be the best data points for learning what makes Bach Bach note by note.
A California Startup Is Using Ashes to Protect Forests
It's worth noting that in order to flag a comment, you must click the permalink first.

I've seen political stories flagged pretty quickly during normal HN usage, but rarely comment threads.