skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on my research (conducted now, without fact-checking), there might be one (NH) or three depending on your definition:

New Hampshire: requires a driver to provide proof that they can cover 25/50/25 in standard insurance speak (after being found at fault in an accident, I think).

Virginia: allows a driver to pay the state a $500/year fee instead.

Mississippi: allows a driver to post cash or bond.
Mapping the Growth of Disability Claims in America
For those comparing the cost of public transit to Uber don't forget to keep in mind that Uber is also subsidized by the government. They are not paying 100% of the cost of the roads and other infrastructure they use.
Fair enough; as long as everyone is included in the set of potential thought leaders then the process can be properly meritocratic.
You could, for example, write a compiler in Python that generated native code (or LLVM bitcode to be passed to llc or whatever) via the LLVM API. Writing a compiler in Python vs. C/C++ would be a lot easier in a number of ways.

I'm not aware of any "production grade" compilers that do this, but no hard reason why not, I guess. Seems like it'd be nice for prototyping etc. if nothing else.
The true nightmares come once you give a picture of yourself - this was incredibly fun.
Accessing 3GPP specs in PDF format
I don't want to ride public transport with crazy people or people that want to beg me for money or even just people that have bad hygiene or talk loudly or listen to music without headphones. Why is that unreasonable? Oh and I'd also not be waiting in the hot sun or the freezing cold for a bus that may or may not arrive on time. Then, I get to take a tour of the city while the bus stops every two minutes rather than going directly to where I need to go.

Ever been from Newark Airport to midtown Manhattan? You have to take a shuttle "train" to the PATH or NY Transit, then ride that into the City, then walk a dozen blocks or wait on a crosstown bus and then another bus.

Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin.

As far as the disabled and elderly, interesting you mention that! How many subway stations in NYC are wheelchair accessible -- how many of those actually have functioning elevators? Of those, how many of those elevators don't smell like a homeless urinal? Very, very few stations in NYC are accessible and all of them are dirty.

Public transport would be great if I didn't have to share it with the public.
What are your thoughts on the tens of thousands of San Franciscans who do renovations on their homes without getting permits from the city? Are they disgusting as well?
Egan makes it clear on his web site that he has chosen not to publish any photos of himself online. Any human who speaks either English, French, Italian, Spanish or Czech would know this after reading http://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm ... and there are some human-curated sites where the message has clearly been understood and repeated (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan and http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32699.Greg_Egan ).

But apparently Google's algorithms don't allow for this possibility, so in the absence of the kind of signal they're expecting, they faff around amplifying noise. But even if it's beyond their ability to understand the simple declarative sentences on sources like Egan's web site and the Wikipedia article that say there are no photos, there are at least three things in the current sidebar results that are obvious bugs, and would be trivial to fix.

1. They have used photos from primary sources that are pages related to someone called "Greg Egan", but have nothing in their content, or context, to suggest that they are about a science fiction writer of that name. If a web page does not contain the words "author", "writer" or "book" at least once, then it is not about a writer. The pages they've taken images from include a lawyer, a painter, a random Twitter account, and a random Flickr post, all of which would be eliminated by that simple test.

2. They have used photos from secondary sources of extremely dubious quality, mainly script-generated regurgitations of Wikipedia or Wikiquote which mash up the original source material with results from Google image searches, and throw in some ads for, err, "Hot Young Single Girls Seeking Older Men". Google knows full well that these are junk sites; they don't appear in the first twenty pages of an ordinary text search for "Greg Egan". So why rely on them as sources for this sidebar?

3. They have a photo of Vernor Vinge, in a sidebar that's meant to be about Greg Egan. Google "knows" it is a photo of Vinge, in the sense that if you do a Google image search on exactly that image file, it says "Best guess: Vernor Vinge." So as with (2), if they took their own judgements and resources seriously, they would not be using that image here.
My understanding is that only one state (North Carolina) requires auto insurance to get a drivers license.

I can offer the anecdote that you can get a drivers license in California by taking the exam in a rented car. Presumably you can borrow a registered, insured car (from a friend, say) in nearly every state?
> most of which are built on package maintainers’ laptops

Gracious, is that really true? My experience of interacting with Debian/Ubuntu is via launchpad.net, where you push the dsc (source tarball + patches + metadata), and the server takes care of producing binary archives for the supported architectures.
> In the USA, obviously SF against NYC, you need to get information from Americans. I can't help you.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I'm based here and making those comparisons myself.

Specifically, NYC has both finance and tech. For developers (not quants), big tech pays better.
Well 10x doesn't necessarily mean 10x longer, it might mean something with 10x the total wing area and thus 10x the lifting capacity. Which might only be say 3x the length and 3x the width.
I'm not sure you read the article. In it explains he went overboard, a lot of it wasn't needed for the interviews & narrows down his recommendation to ~3 books.
I look forward to the day that I have a big ol' "get out of my way" button on the dashboard of my ambulance...

I think I saw a light change on demand in my hometown (Wake County, NC) for an ambulance the other day. It was late at night with minimal traffic and the light had just turned red ahead of me. The ambulance was between me and the light and the light immediately cycled back to green as the ambulance approached. I'd never seen or heard of this before, but do you know whether emergency vehicles are now able to influence traffic signals?

edit: apparently so - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption
You should be able to get one at this price if you go abroad.
Same here! But since I run my own business, this has actually been a liability at times...

What I found to work is grow a beard when I need to appear older, then shave it to appear younger :-)
And I'm very glad Uber is doing that!

The DMVs need valid "reasons" to extract money. With human drivers, they can argue a database record must be maintained for traffic violations, a new license reissued every N years, etc. This is "plausible deniability", because there is no reason why it would cost tens of dollars per row in a database.

With self driving cars, plausible deniability goes away. There is no reason whatsoever. If the algorithm does not follow traffic laws, it won't be allowed on the road.

Another nice thing to notice: the DMV is double dipping. I mean, one fee for the self-driving car, another fee for the human behind the wheel, what a profitable operation! But why exactly? What kind of good services is it offering? None at all.

Self driving cars could mean the end of DMVs, and I would see that as a very good thing.
> have potentially unsafe run ins with the mentally ill.

while i understand your point, it's not really fair. you can have potentially unsafe run-ins with the mentally sane just as easily. you can also have potentially unsafe run-ins with the mentally ill while in a Lyft or Uber.

You are trying to say thay you want a quiet, peaceful, possibly even restful commute because you want to be focused at work. But that's not what you are actually typing.
> I've made it a point to add to my resume and online profiles the other things about which I am passionate. The silly art project that I launched in Austin. My dog business. Running, painting, writing. It's important to me that these attributes be valued by my workplace

Good luck mate, that's got nothing to do with software development. If you don't love software development then applying for a software job at a software firm probably isn't the best idea. Many small buisnesses need software people who are pasionate about other things. Many of these things include "Running, painting, writing" but a software shop writning software owned by people in the software industry populated entierly by people who absolutly love writing software probably isn't the place for that.
He didn't say he didn't.
> So you really seem to be missing my point

Yes, I was. I got it now, thanks for the clarification; I think we're in closer agreement than I thought.

Essentially where I think we now differ is in the motivation of Brouwer et al. -- they don't seem interested in contrasting with other approaches as much as showing that Verlinde's EG (or at least the claim at the start of their section 4) survives contact with observational data. Additionally, I think we differ on whether that's enough to make the paper worth writing in the first place.

(Where we probably most strongly agree is that there is a lot of breathless hype from Leiden, Amsterdam and Groningen lately.)
Where "Dark" literally means: does not interact in any way with light
If only there were a special government program to help me to import one at this price so I didn't have to pay so much for a local one...
I believe the minimum considered secure for standard DHE is 2048 bits. Qualys will label 1024 bit DHE exchanges as WEAK.

256-bit+ ECDHE is also considered secure on the standard curves (x25519, secp256r1, secp384r1).
Drivers do.
I'm sorry, I meant socialism is a great system where everyone is equal! In fact it's so equal, that I want you to have sex with my wife.
Backblaze 4.3.0 – The Rollover Release
> The Google study emphasizes what Google tests for, not what you need for the profession.

While it's applicability to actual software development is debatable, the Google interview is not substantially different from other top tech company interviews.

I'm sure the author will be well-served with this knowledge even if they don't end up working at Google. There are dozens of other companies which will test the same knowledge (and also pay well).

The IB comparison is apt. People routinely study extensively and run a gauntlet to get a job at an investment bank, and that preparation is generally applicable to multiple different banks.
and yet, people who have the money to pay for a faster communte have time to spare and people who cant don't.
>"They have less primary & secondary education relevant to today's enterprise issues"

What primary and secondary education that gets out of date matters much for a software developer? Algorithms, complexity etc. don't change much. The technology changes so much and is do vast that what fresh graduates know won't help much.

The only thing I as a hiring manager value about a university degree is that it signals that you have enough discipline to see something through even if you don't always like it. There are plenty of people who can't or don't want to do that. If you can't do that no amount of smarts is gonna make me want to hire you.
I disagree with the article and the notion that asking for a portfolio is about passion. I guess it does add insight for that, but really only shows basic proficiency. I wouldn't hire an artist, writer or designer without seeing a portfolio of their work so why would I hire a software developer?

I too have been on both sides of the hiring discussion. Because anyone can write anything on there resume, there are only two way to know if someone can code. They can write some code of they can show some code they have written. As both an interviewer and interviewer I would rather work with real world problems and discuss real world solutions.

So the choice seems to be between stupid whiteboard processes or portfolios. I suspect there is a reason writers and painters don't have auditions and perhaps that same logic maps onto programming.
I can see this causing a lot of outcry, but I think some people would pay extra just to ride with other people who can afford to pay extra.

It reminds me of how I've heard some people say that Target is a more expensive Walmart, where you're paying extra to avoid Walmart shoppers.
When I started programming, I had side projects coming out of my ears. It was pure recreation.

After getting a "real" programming job, where I had to deal with design-by-committee, power struggles, keeping up appearances, etc. I didn't dare jump back into recreational programming--I'd never go back to my actual job.

Even now, working for myself, I have to be very disciplined when I crack open the "fun" code, because I know it will be very painful when it is time to go back to the code that pays the bills.
Considering even web pages today though, it's not often I want to build everything from scratch using just HTML. Rather I want to be able to drag and drop bootstrap/foundation/material components, but since I can't I might as well just use a dumb editor and live-reload changes in my browser as WYISWYG isn't working for me anymore. And I agree, WYISWYG editors fall far behind IDEs and text editors when it comes to the code.
that's not really a good stick to measure against.
I hope you don't use AWS then. Just because you don't see 25 year-olds as competent adults doesn't mean that plenty of other places aren't using them in critical roles to great effect.

Though maybe you have a really loose definition of genius?
If you don't believe Jeff Atwood, I'm not sure why you'd believe me based just on my anecdata, but at a previous job I gave a simple filtering programming task to interviewees (not exactly fizz buzz, but very close. Single loop, multiple 10-line solutions possible).

Out of 10, only 1 solved it well, 2-3 solved it acceptably (only edge case bugs), the rest never solved it, or had obvious bugs or code that would never pass peer review.

Of course, I could just be a shitty interviewer, but I always had a (changing) peer present during interviews, and I hope we were an honest enough company that they'd tell me if they thought I was.
Personally the Googleyness thing is the most cult-like aspect of Google by far.
And neither does the DMV... Which as stated in the previous thread on this, it seems they are exceeding the legislation that covers this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13181514
Unless you've written a lot of Python 2, or ported a lot of it in my case, then you wouldn't know. It's a stupid question with little basis in actually seeing if someone know's what they are talking about.
This is somewhat true. However, raising gross margin by cutting depreciation is a good thing. And throw in "green" for karma points. Using hardware that takes less space and power with more performance will get most good 'big dot com ops managers' happier.
Recreational drugs affect the brain in a very different manner when compared to medication, which is designed to be safer. I have ADHD and have taken prescription amphetamines before. They're much safer drugs than a recreational stimulant. There are many reasons for this.

The subjective "high" caused by a drug is determined by how fast the concentration of dopamine increases¹ in the brain. Each individual drug has a distinct mechanism of action, so they all increase dopamine concentration at different rates. The high is also linked to the route of administration of the drug; the fastest routes are intravenous administration and inhalation, followed by intranasal administration.

Prescription stimulants are designed¹ to modulate neuronal circuits in a healthy manner. Recreational drugs do the opposite. They aim for a massive release of dopamine in the brain's mesolimbic reward system. All drugs that can lead to addiction have this effect.

High concentrations of dopamine results in neuroadaptation² in those circuits. Their receptors are down-regulated so as to better tolerate the drug. Less receptors for the same concentration of neurotransmitter translates to a diminished response. This is why the first use of the drug provides the strongest stimulation. It also explains why addicts may continuously escalate the dose; they're attempting to get that same level of stimulation again.

Neuroadaptation is also associated with withdrawal effects. After down-regulation occurs, the new amount of receptors is appropriate for higher concentrations of the neurotransmitter. After the drug wears off, concentrations are back to physiologic levels which are no longer adequate. The resulting neurotransmission deficiency results in withdrawal effects. The flow of information within the affected circuits has become dependent on the higher neurotransmitter levels³ caused by the drug.

>How bad do the consequences have to be before a behavior becomes pathological?

In the development of addiction, a dramatic change in behavior can be observed: addicts gradually shift from impulsive use of the drug for pleasure and reward to compulsive use in order to avoid the adverse effects associated with withdrawal.

These impulsive-compulsive disorders are proposed¹ as the common neurobiological substrate of many disorders, not just addiction. They're also linked to OCD, gambling, obesity and others.

¹ Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology. Chapter 12 and 14. http://imgur.com/a/LcgkT

² https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18316420

³ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3036556/
I see. I made the wrong assumption then that sending 8 satellites from a rocket that gets some help from a plane (requiring less propellant/size) was more cost-effective. Thanks for clarifying.
I have worked at a prestigious tech company, and I know what OP is talking about.

A lot of very talented people don't have side projects, and they don't do any coding outside of work. They don't go to hackathons. They don't bother to learn the newest reactive javascript framework. They go to yoga classes after work. They talk about TV shows they watched last night during lunch.

But they EXCEL at what they do at work.

I can say that this is really a subjective thing. When you make a judgment about these people, it actually tells more about yourself than the person being judged.

When I saw these people who are super talented, but "waste away their lives" just climbing up the ladder I just couldn't sympathize. Also personally I like them but I would never think about starting a company with them.

That's why I understand where OP is coming from, and he's right in a lot of cases, but also I think he should understand that not everyone will agree with you on how you view your life. People like me can't stand not working on my own project, but there are also super talented people who are perfectly fine with living a balanced and stable life. Talent and intelligence has nothing to do with how you live your life.

So, I think no one should judge anyone else. The company who didn't hire this guy may have lost a talented person, but in many cases talent is not what companies need the most.

For large companies like Amazon (which OP seems to work at) this type of employee is the ideal choice since they get the talent AND stability.

But for startups, the concept of stability doesn't really make sense anyway so it's a different story. If I was doing a startup and had to pick the first employee, and was given a choice between a passionate, right out of the college guy, and an experienced and talented engineer who wants to live a balanced life, I would definitely choose the former. (Although the best case would be to find the third guy who's passionate AND talented)
You would probably enjoy Go, for the most part.
Safer statistical in the mostly human driving environment is meant, and that already takes humans better understanding/prediction of other humans into acccount. If you keep safer (robot) drivers off the road, you're killing people to cover your ass.
minimum 1024. preferred is gonna be 2048 or 4096 if you have to use DHE. Actually preferred is ephemeral elliptic curve diffie hellman, or ecdhe.

PS: the logjam attack is related: https://weakdh.org/
Read the law.. not the DMV's interpretation of it. They aren't currently testing autonomous vehicles.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13181514
There was a lengthy HN discussion when the article was originally published [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10390822
I've often thought that after a certain age, instead of getting some percent increase in salary, it would be preferable instead to work some percentage fewer days or hours. Seems like the idea is finally catching on. I hope I get to enjoy it when the time comes.
Some reasons why Uber might want to fight this:

- Agreeing that they are doing testing, would probably make it more difficult to move to "production" - when do these testing requirements end?

- The California regulations are quite light, but other cities might come up with more complicated requirements. Agreeing in California would set a precedent and make it harder to avoid complying in other cities.

- There's requirements for the test driver. These might be difficult for Uber if they want to use semi autonomous cars in normal business. There is for example requirements for specific training, driver has to be employee or contractor of the company etc.

- If they agreed to apply for testing permit, it might be that the permit is declined or later suspended.

- As others have stated, not having to disclose the accidents and other statistics might allow them to avoid bad publicity and keep stuff hidden from competitors.

- Looks like one part of the requirements is to enroll into "Employer pull notice program". I don't think that applies just for test vehicle drivers. Would this have some implications for company like Uber?
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_...
Tried 3 different browsers, still no chart showing up.
It will likely cost less to insure self driving systems. Especially over time. It won't get ever get drunk, it won't get tired. It will be less likely to operate a vehicle that is in disrepair, it will be less likely to operate a vehicle in weather it can't cope with. It won't be in a hurry. It won't be eating. It will learn from mistakes made by other self driving systems.

It's also pretty likely that whatever framework develops to license the systems will address liability (I think by requiring the operator of record to insure the vehicle).
You're describing public transportation in Ottawa.
Lots of IRC servers host their logs online.
Nope. Gasoline taxes pay for roads. Vehicle registration taxes pay for even more services from the government. Income taxes on earnings pays for some things as well.

However city buses are tax subsidized. Why not boost the fare to actually cover the costs? Cities buses are driving on subsidized roads -- their fuel, vehicles, maintenance and marketing is tax subsidized. They even have special lanes built just for them -- paid for involuntary by people who are opposed to such things. Uber is paid for entirely by those that chose to pay for it, which is how it should be.

Why should I pay for city buses I won't ride? Why shouldn't the people riding the bus pay for it?
That sounds like a great HN handle.
Bought Oclus Rift, played with it a lot, then created a site where you can take them for rent. Got #1 position in Google for "rent oculus". Outcome: about 4k this year. Now stopped it.
> Most companies seem to believe that knowledge transfer just happens magically,or should.

Put more experienced with less experienced workers working together and it does happen magically.