skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not merely "I don't like Comcast", though I (and a huge portion of their customers) really don't like Comcast.

It is the very high potential, one might even say certainty, that if given the opportunity to hobble their competitors in the entertainment space and to give themselves a massive advantage, they will do so.

The telcos and cable operators in the US have never been anything but monopoly or duopoly players. They don't know how to compete on any other field. If they are given the gun with which to shoot Netflix (for example) in the head (or demand ransoms that only major players can pay), they will likely pull the trigger the same day.

So, no. It's not about disliking Comcast, it is about knowing with confidence that the internet will be harmed, maybe drastically, by giving Comcast (and a few others who play according the same rules) the ability to do so.
We are living the Malthusian dystopia and the solution is as trivial to state as it is impossible to implement. A global one child policy.
There are upsides.

We all die. The more healthcare technology we invent, the more we can spend. If you are willing to spend unlimited money to save a life, then you will... except that every system finds a way to stop you.

Traditional all-out capitalism stops you when you can't pay. (people also don't WANT to pay with their own money, so costs go down) Some government systems will say "no" to some people, but that isn't too popular. Most common is to say "yes" to everybody, but underfunding means you go on a waiting list and might not make it to the other end of the waiting list. These approaches can be mixed: some procedures for pay, some favored people being able to jump ahead on the waiting list, etc.

Underfunding is a given, because full funding for all the care that people want is impossible. The amount of care desired exceeds the GDP.
People my age drive down the road and listen to music. No one - and i mean no one - ever checks out the advertisements on the side of the road. I really don't see anyway for them to make money at this point.
> Actually, the biggest danger is that political instability brought on by climate change will lead to nuclear war

Can you please elaborate on this point?
Try flying to Europe from an eastern bloc country, see if you feel civil then.
Automation doesn't mean no competitive advantage.
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The Trump kakistocracy is nothing if not an interesting new phenomenon.
I guess it made sense to keep the brand since people do associate it with Microsoft. Like how iTunes ain't really all about tunes anymore.
I think you missed the point of the comment... "fear and shock tactics" have been applied to me wrt climate change, vegetarianism, etc. But all they seem to have done is desensitize me. Hence my saying that they do not work.

I'm exploring whether there are things that I (and the rest of the HN audience) can do to make a dent. Right now my measure of effectiveness and productivity is almost exclusively related to dev work.
It'd be worthwhile to find a way to expand this to include more nebulous objectives - and having some practical things to work on seems a step in the right direction?
Add Transparent Watermark Annotation and Hyperlink Support in PDF Footnote Text
You should checkout vimium https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
As a SoCal transplant to the bay area, my biggest observation is that it's basically mandatory to "have a cause" in the bay area. It doesn't really matter what it is. It could be cycling over driving. It could be how you eat. It could be political activism. But it has to be something, or people look at you funny.

Aside from the Venice Beach / Santa Monica scene (which is absolutely superficial), I find SoCal to be much more laid back. Live and let live, if you will.
I've been banned from everywhere else
That seems to be the point. Proper or idiomatic scala code uses tools only available to scala.
I used scala for a while. It has some neat tricks that I grew to like, but I think it ultimately had a problem I noticed in Ruby: there are many "right" ways to do things and each team has its own culture. This makes learning foreign codebase pretty hard--especially with how dense scala code is.
I have been struck by the number of accounts supporting Trump that appear to be either bots or part of a slick marketing campaign. Many of them have glossy photoshopped backgrounds that include Trump, Pence and American imagery. The tweets are vociferous and highly partisan. It's actually a little overwhelming and has pushed me away from the platform.
The iterative algorithms for all of the scientific fields that I've worked on don't fall within the subset that you're describing, so no, I'm not going to agree that you're speaking about the majority of today's algorithms. Weather, climate, finite differencing, FFT... nope. Implicit systems, sure. Radar cross-sections, sure.

And as a CPU designer, are you disagreeing that most FP units today take 4 cycles (fully pipelined) (add and multiply, of course)? And that main memory is a lot farther away than that?

Given 20 years of experience, you missed out on the Cray PVP machines that were the start of this sub-thread. But the cycle counts I'm giving are modern ones. Cray did eventually implement IEEE in these machines without any significant problems, but that was more than 20 years ago.
Also, every time Netflix releases an app on a new platform, their UI gets collectively slightly worse on all platforms. It's probably the sheer burden of building and supporting and synchronizing so many client apps.
If that is the best shot Lyft has, it would seem futile
Because the industry (TAM) is very large and they generate a tremendous amount of revenue. Because their platform is considered very scalable and once they get it figured out they could operate at much lower margins and make more profit.
The problem is they're not profitable today.
Ask HN: Should I continue with my idea even though it already exists?
Every time cloud services have an outage, this line of reasoning becomes less and less appealing.

Your analysis assumes all other factors are constant. Change causes downtime, cloud services have a high rate of change (constantly pushing new configs, new code), many other servers don't.
Sure, and analysis of it might be on topic; garden variety political news stories about it, however, don't seem to be.
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In a lot of places, Uber/Lyft is a significantly better experience. The cars show up when you call them - reliably and quickly. The drivers don't long-haul you to rip you off. They go places taxis won't to pick you up. They're generally cheaper and cleaner.

Ten years ago, taxis were terrible. Even in San Francisco. Now there's Uber and Lyft.
If Netflix just pays for bandwidth, that's net neutrality. If Comcast discriminates pricing based on anything besides byte delivery cost, that's not neutrality.
Wow, this was really not worth the time it took to read it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13760087
The Catholic Church is a nonprofit. Would you be OK with them having a monopoly on zero-rated spiritual information?
Oxygen and nutrition; we can't even get self-sustaining bio domes working now, despite decades of attempts.

We could solve the problem, sure, but it's a race against time while society is crumbling, in this scenario.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704300
I think he wishes that here was an "edited" annotation next to changed titles.
As a completely practical matter, a country is entitled to do what it wants to protect an industry. I'd agree that it is usually a bad idea, but every country does it to some degree. If France decides it has a right (god given, or lawfully given) to a wine industry then it can ban all wine imports. I'm not sure why you'd call out America for this, it has been far more open to trade than most countries, and benefitted from it. UNfortunately it has left some people behind and caused a backlash.
Ive used Scala as both "better java" and as "worse-haskell" in two different teams. Both times it was much more pleasant than doing Java.
It's not any better, but it's also worth less than 1/10th the valuation of the other, meaning it could be undervalued in comparison.
You can start an iron fertilization project for around 20k in boat rental fees + legal fees for illegal ocean dumping. Major companies do it for less altruistic reasons all the time.
OzLockCon 2017 Call for Papers and Workshops
Lyft differentiates itself by throwing slightly more scraps to the drivers and not being Uber. It's shit, but cabbies aren't exactly working with a full benefits package and stock options either. I agree that Lyft is only marginally better than Uber, but it's hard to know where to go when basically every service industry seems to exist to exploit workers for profit. Do you just walk everywhere? Go live in the woods? It's a shit deal but we live in this system - worrying about 'ethical' consumption choices rather than trying to untangle root causes can feel like missing the point. Not that there's much chance of meaningful change there, either. Idunno.
Yes, the update clipped some of my settings. I had to consult my project-level settings to remember what they were. Also OSX.
non-profit just means there is no corporate owner. A non-profit can still be run in a way that enriches management and employees, and a for-profit can have a strong social contribution.
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ParentPowered | CTO | Bay Area, CA | ONSITE
ParentPowered is an Ed Tech startup that creates easy-to-use tools for great parenting.
The company, which builds on research conducted by the founders while at Stanford, has significant momentum - it's rapdily scaling its first product, Ready4K, in the U.S. and beyond.
Our stack:
* PostgreSQL, Ruby, AWS, Sidekiq, Twilio, Nexmo, Plivo, HTML, CSS
What we offer:
* Equity in the company
* Competitive salary
* Full health, dental, and vision benefits
* Paid time off and sick leave
* Flexible working hours with the potential to work from home
* An exciting development roadmap that includes core platform enhancements, a self-service administration panel, two-way communication, personalization, localization, social networking, and machine learning.
* Great people
Email Tiffany @ tiffany.graham@parentpowered.com
GMO!!!
Don't listen to the HN haters, this is incredible and really exciting! Thanks for contributing such a great project and making it Open Source - that takes a lot of bravery and courage. Keep it up, very impressed!
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It's not—and anyone who says that it is is deluding themselves.

I think we've reached the point where ridesharing apps are 100% a commodity: there's no real product differentiation, so I'll choose based on price and how long it'll take the car to arrive. Lyft drivers seem 'happier,' but that hasn't translated into anything significantly different for me in terms of ride quality.

This won't be a popular opinion, but I think most drivers—on both services—are too entitled and have unrealistic expectations. Having a driver's license and a car is not rare in the US: it's a job that requires less specialized training/skill than being a fry cook at McDonald's, and should be compensated accordingly.

The drivers who are happy are the ones who recognize this and do it to make some extra cash in their spare time after a 'real' job; the ones who are upset are trying to make their living driving. While I sympathize with the latter breed, they're in a dying occupation that's about to be automated out of existence within the next ~5 years.
I don't think this will work because I don't think modern megacorporations suffer consequences for poor ethics the way normal-sized local businesses did a hundred years ago. If the local tannery was run by a bad person, people would say "I don't do business with him" and he could lose 50% of his serviceable customers and employees. Today, the corporations are completely faceless, and the fact that there are actual people behind Uber the company is not readily apparent when using their app. People will just go for the cheapest ride and think only briefly about the scandal they read about last week.
No, it's "GNU\Windows" ;)
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13767245
Apparently you need to have over 251 karma to use the feature
I'm not on the Amazon Fresh/Instacart trend yet (and may not be -- I really enjoy grocery shopping and frequent different farmers' markets, so it's not a problem I need to have solved for me).

But as for Uber/Lyft, the reason they're vastly more valuable than whatever local taxi website/app is convenience and lack of friction. When you get an Uber, you don't have to worry about payment or directions; it's all handled for you. When you get to a different city, you don't have to google the local taxi companies and pick one; you just open Lyft and get a ride.
The question wasn't really why are they better than taxis, but why is Lyft considered a more ethical business than Uber, which has faced criticism, especially recently.
Some hints: The Field of View in the demo is bad.(You can query the screen parameters and estimate the viewers distance).

Also your normalmap calculations could be improved.
Architecting applications for the cloud is a non-trivial problem. Lot of forethought needs to go in place while choosing a particular infrastructure component. And the ideas of resiliency, robustness (what can be bucketed into 'graceful-degradation') etc along with the most important Monitoring needs to be put in place right from the initial days of the app, so that rearchitecting is does NOT end up being a costly affair.
Why do you think they're bots? Because they have nicknames? Good branding is now a sign of automation? Lol
I don't know what Lyft's corporate culture is like, but I'd rather not support a company whose attitude towards women is like Sterling Cooper Draper Price or where corporate advancement is a Game of Thrones, lest other firms see this as a model to emulate and these behaviors proliferate. I don't want to work in a corporate culture that resembles a preppy/bro boys club that thinks darwinism is a theory you can apply socially

Also, Lyft gives me the option of tipping the driver with my card, which I generally do if the driver provides something more than just transportation from point A to B. Some drivers have told me and a first date a series of jokes, thus being a great icebreaker. Others have helped me carry my drunk friend to the door. I don't like to carry cash and I find Uber's policy to be a commodification of an essentially human experience and almost dehumanizing. A lot of times, I don't tip and I don't feel a whit of guilt about it.
Nobody uses "floating point number" to mean "a number that could theoretically exist in a floating point system I will invent

Put a full stop there -- Oh yes, people do mean that! Most of the time, people are referring to a bit representation in a specific system like IEEE's.

a floating point system I will invent for you after you tell me the number"

The above part of the sentence isn't a definition of "floating point number." It's how I use the common notion of "floating point number" in my argument. Your objection only looks like it works because you conflate the two concepts. If you don't conflate the two concepts, then you are arguing that most low level programming that deals with 32 bit floats doesn't actually deal with "floating point numbers." That is a reasonable assertion for a reasonable set of definitions. However, it's not the one I'm using, which also fits the reality of the mental models most people are actually using.

In terms of program correctness, you can find many examples where using an abstract concept of "floating point" instead of the concrete representation will produce errors. So then why is it "the correct one" as you say?
> neither Lyft nor Uber has demonstrated a "financially viable business

Self driving cars
You say it's pretty bad and nonsense, yet you haven't found (or even looked very hard) about alternatives. So maybe don't jump to the conclusion that floating point is terrible just yet :)
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It didn't work out very well for the dinosaurs, did it?
I think it boils down to PR and ethics at this point.

From a consumer's point of view, both services offer a convenience layer over taxis: you have an online account that hooks into your credit card, which means you can just summon a car using your magic pocket computer, step inside, talk to the (generally friendlier-and-more-sociable-than-a-cab-driver) driver, and get out at your destination without having to guide the driver around the city, or having to take your wallet out of your pocket.

That they're priced similarly (and frequently lower) than regular cabs means both of these apps are in demand, period. The convenience layer makes them competitive against cabs even at equal fares.

If Lyft and Uber are essentially identical (which is arguable), then putting their company culture and PR under scrutiny is fair game and the natural direction consumers will go in.
Also, the quality of Uber cars has declined, even within "black" and especially "SUV" classes.

So, might as well save the money.
Lyft and Uber, from a birds-eye view, do the exact same thing; and furthermore, neither is profitable, so the entire market is built upon potential future sales bases. Lyft is here valued at, generously, $7 billion. Meanwhile, Uber's valuation is reported variously, but a general Google search suggests its well in excess of $50 billion.

This exceeds any expectation of market craziness. Are these investors talking to each other? Are things so far gone that a vague promise of self-driving cars is worth almost a factor of ten valuation difference?
As societies get richer, they have less kids. And each child has more capital. This isn't a bad outcome.
Are you drunk? Careful, even high pointed accounts get axed here when they're belligerent.

Calling someone out on their perceived lack of analysis? At least back it up with your own, hopefully substantive, insight.
PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
Except when #DeleteUber trends on Twitter... Sure it won't be 50% but I doubt the charts look pretty
Admittedly one of the first reasons I preferred Uber to taxis was that I didn't have to deal with tipping but Lyft does at least offer the option whereas Uber drivers are left with whatever scraps the company decides to throw them that week.
If you have a way to improve on the existing product, then absolutely - that can be through the product itself, pricing, service, whatever. Alternatively, if you think it would be educational for you to build, then go ahead.