skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The economics, politics, and logistics are brutal. Say you build out to the whole city of Baltimore, and get 40% to subscribe at a cost of $5,0000 per subscriber.[1] You issue a bond at 4% interest. So you gotta cover $200 in interest per year per subscriber. Say you charge $70 for service, and 60% of your revenue goes out the door in maintenance and customer service.[2] After paying debt service, you have $135 per year to pay down principal. So it takes you 37 years to pay down your principal. 30-year bonds may be practical for a school building, but not so much for a telecom network where you'll need to make ongoing capital expenditures to upgrade the network.[3]

Then there is the politics. It's a political non-starter to issue city bonds to build a network you lease out to private ISPs to sell $70/month internet service that poor people and the elderly can't afford. So some sort of cross-subsidy has to be baked into the deal, and that involves charging higher-income customers more than $70/month. But that makes it harder to hit the 40% uptake rate. And if you can't hit that, you're really screwed because the uptake rate drives your per-household cost.

And then there is logistics. Who do you pay to maintain said fiber network? Cities have no experience or staff capable of doing it. So you have to create a new department, and staff it (at least in Baltimore) a relatively expensive unionized workforce (which makes it harder to hit your 40% operating margin above).

[1], [2] Roughly cribbed from the financials of EBP's network in Chattanooga.

[3] The FiOS network is only 10 years old, and Verizon is about to spend a bunch of money to upgrade from GPON to NGPON-2.
And Gmail complies to privacy laws indeed. They can scan content automatically to show ads, but they cannot sell a list of people that you exchanged email with, at least not without your consent.
What is a good employee engagement SaaS tool for mid-size(50+) companies?
We are looking for a a tool for our employees to be aware of work being done in other departments, feel like they’re in the loop, and ask the exec team questions about strategy and execution (may be even anonymously). Slack doesn't cut it, too noisy. Also, post the 40-employee mark, a company meeting hasn't been sufficient.

I’ve looked around but haven’t found something. Would appreciate any recommendations.
Yes, I added the parenthesis after posting because I was concerned that someone might do exactly what you did - focus on the most controversial possible interpretation of my statement rather than address it at face value.

I'll follow your lead and say that this will be my last response too, because your post has shown to me that we're talking past each other entirely.

> there seem to be alot of people backing up this opinion based upon nothing other than politics

The point I've been making this whole time is that you simply cannot separate politics from "other" in the way you wish to. Politics is intertwined in every decision we make and every opinion we hold. The fact that you choose (without evidence) to label those you disagree with as "ultra-liberals" underlines this. You paint yourself as politically neutral yet you are clearly evaluating others in political terms.

We can't have "politically neutral" political discourse, it makes no sense. There is no "non-political Peter Thiel".
...and yet when there was mandatory drug testing it showed a drug use rate lower than the general population. How do you reconcile those contrasting data points? (honest question, not a troll)
Which has applications in human society. Using it for an attempt at AI safety, however, seems... A tad optimistic.

It's basically just a fancy AI-box, and there's little reason to trust those.
It sounds to me like maybe your problem is not necessarily with "managers" specifically, but more generally with people, and by extension, yourself. Relationships are hard, no matter what. We humans are primates by nature, and domination and submission are facts of our everyday experience. I myself struggle with "authority figures", with people "telling me what to do", etc. And I think we all struggle with this as it is just a condition of being human.

I think if you can work on accepting this fact of
"primate-ness" that we have, and look not just at your work relationships, but also your personal relationships to see how you are at times either dominant or submissive, you will begin to see how accepting a "subordinate" role not only benefits you (with a paycheck), but also benefits the person "above" you (your manager who gets to feel dominant), and the people who depend on you (family and friends who care about you, they can see you holding down a job).

This quote by Robert Heinlein springs to mind:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
FairPlay: a system to detect fraudulent and malware Google Play apps
> Only one way to find out

When it comes to building smarter-than-human AI, "try it and see" is never the right answer. You may only get one attempt to get it right, and you don't take "try it and see" chances with existential risk.

(There's been some interesting research into making it possible to monitor and halt a rogue AI, but no matter how promising that looks, it should still be treated as one of many risk mitigation strategies rather than as a panacea. Still better to consider that you might only get one attempt.)

I don't think it makes sense to consider this kind of approach with superintelligence; either it understands and implements human values, in which case attempting to treat it as an adversary is counterproductive, or it fails to understand and implement human values, in which case you've utterly failed on a "better luck next universe" scale.

However, it does make sense to consider this kind of approach with machine learning in general. One of the problems with machine learning techniques is "give us all your data and we'll do smart things with it", which doesn't work out so well if you want to keep such data private. This approach might provide more options in that case, such as offloading some of your expensive computations and learnings without actually exposing your data.
>Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing politicians to agree to some left-wing ideals[...]

Why is this a goal for anyone?
So I think your ideas are good, but you have to realize the multiple competing priorities in healthcare. When you say ideally, you mean from a privacy standpoint. In my opinion "best health outcome of the patient" should be the highest ideal.

Say I am working a night where I may be paged on 100 patients who I am meeting for the first time. Just opening their records on The EMR eats a significant amount of time. Time which I need to take care of people. Adding an additional click would mean even less time and poorer outcomes.

You also have to realize that nobody is going to carry a USB. I have worked in diabetes clinics where most pts don't remember to bring in their glucometer, which is the entire point of the clinic. You have to realize that the patient population also includes the average American (and half by definition are below average intelligence.)

I mean, I could go on for hours and make my own personal list of the issues with American Healthcare and I wouldn't list pt privacy in the first 100....

Not trying to be dismissive but I'm just trying to give you computer technical folk an idea of why EMR is such a hard field and how many factors you have to consider which is really difficult if you aren't 'in' the system. Even I who knows more about programming than 99% of docs feel completely ignorant when I talk to healthcare IT folks about HL7, etc...
Just as a thought experiment, try to imagine a world with no patent or copyright laws. I'm not suggesting we make that a reality, but just consider it. How would Lockheed Martin, GE, Disney, etc. look? Without local government granted monopolies, how would Comcast look? It would be a completely different world.

Look into the concept of regulatory capture. The Dodd-Frank regulations that went into place are a great example of this. They were sold to us plebes as a way to protect us from future banking failures. Except the regulations were basically written by the big banks and forced the small banks out of business. They have actually increased the risk of future crisis by consolidating the industry. Here's an article about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/04/14/has-dodd-fra...
It looks like their payload was 2,900 lbs to orbit, and then they used engines on the orbiter to spiral up and enter mars injection orbit. Total scientific payload was only 30 lbs.

It's unclear from Wikipedia whether the booster put it into LEO or closer to GTO, but it appears it has has the capability to put 3k lbs near GTO.

For contrast, a Falcon 9 can put 18k lbs in GTO for $62M, so maybe a 1,800 lb scientific payload to Mars. But that doesn't include payload costs and payload development cost, so probably well over $100M. And building a probe in 18 months has to be really hard.

It will be interesting if Falcon 9 prices drop because of re-usability, say to $30M, whether that will open up the opportunity to do lots of custom probes to inner planets and asteroid belt.
I agree. IP protection and data privacy issues are a better short-term use case... and fortunately we have some time to make better HE algos before any of our AIs are really getting that smart. :)
By the time they grow as large as IBM, they will be just as (in)efficient. :)
Because nobody wants to live there? That's why it's cheap.

I fear a lot of SF homeless enjoy being in SF for similar reasons that a lot of the not-homeless do. Can the prospect of free housing in a random area lure them away? Maybe? It's hard to say.
If you're going to pirate anime, please don't do it on a streaming site with ads.
Wow, how random that you are on here too, haha. Thanks for building a great product. It addressed pretty much every gripe I had with the bigger streaming services.
There's more than water. A lot of things that freeze into a crystal lattice can be less dense than their liquid states. Silicon dioxide is another IIRC.
Is this mostly related to insider trading, or ways to get around other, broader things that are illegal?
One of the reasons to put tracks on a vehicle is to reduce the pressure it exerts on the ground. A bulldozer might weigh 15x as much as light truck, but if it has 75x the contact area, it would have (much!) lower ground pressure, and would be dramatically less prone to sinking into snow or mud or what-have-you.

Some sanity checks:

1993 Toyota 4Runner / Hilux Surf: 25 psi
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure)

Caterpillar D6R LGP Bulldozer: 5 psi
(http://www.ritchiespecs.com/specification?type=Con&category=...)

Some tracked vehicles like bulldozers are available in extra-wide track versions to reduce their ground pressure even further. It wouldn't be surprising if most of the snow fleet is so equipped.
I don't quite understand it. When you replace lock with CAS (Compare and Swap), aren't you just replacing one synchronization primitive with another? Is lock not implemented in CPU as a primitive instruction and therefore less performant? What overhead does locking have compared to CAS?
25 PPC Spy Tools to Outbid Your Competitors
I know what you mean. At the same time I think it's less about what a company thinks is fair and more about what the market will bear. You can find more engineers willing to sell their labor at a lower price in lower cost locations.

Of course, for an all-remote company to adjust salaries by a five or ten thousand bucks based on location if someone moves, like some do, that just seems like they're trying to nickel and dime the person under the guise of being fair.
Also known as Censorship. Google will flag anything that is not left of center.
> No American astronaut died _in space_ until the Challenger explosion.

No American astronaut died in space then, either.
We had no issues today - but we are IPv6
Let's say I agree with you that there is a lot of value in the network and the brand.

The question remains: is there any residual value left in the advice and the "training"?

Or, more importantly, is there significant value in the advice?

Because if the answer to that question is affirmative, then even if I agree with you, it is a worthy pursuit.

Note that value in advice is context sensitive. What might be amazing, valuable advice in 2009 may be standard stuff that you can get off many different courses in 2019.

But while there are many places where you can learn to put the customer first and do some prototyping, there are a limited number of places you can learn what is happening now. ("Sure, in 2011 you could get funding by showing your user studies, but not an investor expects the product to be smart enough to learn the user's preferences on the fly" or whatever).
>a book about someone sitting around and doing nothing sounds a tad boring

May I refer you to the 1859 Russian classic Oblomov -- "Oblomov is a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. Throughout the novel he rarely leaves his room or bed. In the first 50 pages, he manages only to move from his bed to a chair."

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

Oblomov is more a treatise on 19th-century Russian nobility, but I find it interesting that lethargy and lack of direction has been democratized. :)
It's not about who made how much money. It's about redefining the economics of space exploration. Comparing it to a movie makes it easier to understand.
Dumb question: what is a CMS?
For anyone else who didn't know, I believe this means "Rules of Interaction" in this context.

It wasn't overly easy to find.
I've had this argument with my (tending towards elderly) parents while introducing them to Netflix. They don't understand rating for enjoyment, and keep rating for "quality". They'll watch a show, absolutely hate it, but give it a 4 or 5 star rating because "it was well produced and the camera work was good, but it isn't the sort of thing I personally like to watch".

I'm worried about the thumbs up/down, as Netflix has increasingly recommended shows I do not like this year, and I don't think the thumbs solves the "rating for perceived quality" issue. I've been using Movielens for recommendations a lot instead, and it seems more accurate for me... and it has enough stats to show that on their site, most rating is not binary, much closer to a normal curve for average movies or a linear graph on really good movies. (It lets you see the distribution curve on individual movies, and other metrics.)
Also those of you who have disabled QUIC - you should enable it again. It has a serious benefit for most of Google services.
> You don't email your lawyer. You ask Alphabet to do it for you (gmail).

I don't know what point you're trying to make. Are you assuming everyone uses Google's webmail interface or their apps? Maybe those blur the lines of classic Internet email delivery but when I use Mail.app to send an email, I am the one doing the emailing, not the Google SMTP server acting as a mail transfer agent (MTA).

> Many block the outgoing SMTP port

Comcast doesn't, Time Warner doesn't, Verizon doesn't. My hunch is the large majority of U.S. residential ISP customers can connect to an SMTP server other than their ISP's.
> While I think The Intercept is the most important news organization and overall a profoundly beneficial force in the world

The rest of your post makes me totally disagree with this sentiment. If they fail to meet the most basic litmus test for impartiality I don't see how they're any more important than any other news organization.

EDIT: I really, really hope you're not referring to the Hogan case as "brave disregard of certain unfortunate laws".
I feel like this is the future for tomorrow's generation. As artificial intelligence's economies of scale proves to be far more seductive than exploiting human labor, unskilled white/blue collar labor will disappear.

As jobs become scarce like they have become in Japan and Korea, intense competition will inevitably produce 'losers'. Losers in the context of a structural pressure imposed on those that fail to keep up.

I feel like there's a connection between neo-Confucian societies and hikkikomori. It's also a rising phenomenon in South Korea.
cringe I hope this is a joke and that they are running something like OpenBSD.
I work at the LA Times and conducted the data analysis of wages included in this story. We published all the code behind it on GitHub. AMA. https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production-wages...
Thanks! FYI, with pyca/cryptography 1.8 using your https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto, Bit's ECDSA signing is >100 usec faster :)
So increasing minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, universal health care, protecting/expanding social security, and a bunch of other policies that would help the working class don't count?

To be honest, no. Those don't count because most of the people who consider themselves to be the "working class" would be hurt by several of them.

A skilled tradesman who is making the equivalent of $25/hr doesn't want the minimum wage to go up. If it does, it dilutes his buying power. His wage isn't going to magically increase by $8.00/hr.

Unions have done themselves a huge disservice, by alienating the people who are not members but still have to work with them.

The ACA has turned off a lot of people from the idea of government managed health insurance. Many people, myself included, saw the quality of their coverage decrease because of the ACA.
Well then obviously wages haven't risen enough.

For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.
If your contention is that a logical proposition like "no number of confirming observations can verify a universal generalization" can be tested empirically (i.e. by experimental observation of the physical world), then we're going to have to agree to disagree. If you agree that such a proposition is logical rather than empirical, then it seems clear that you see some use for philosophy after all, even if you resist admitting it. =)

Don't get too hung up on Karl Popper or falsifiability, by the way. What I and others are trying to point out to you is that your dismissals of philosophy implicitly rely on a foundation of philosophical arguments.
You're playing semantics here.

If you define a black hole as a clump of matter entirely contained within its own Schwarzschild radius, then it seems that yes, you can have one inside of another.

Even if you define a black hole as "a region from which light can't escape to infinity", a theoretical black hole inside of another black hole doesn't violate this definition.
One possibility, and I think HN is the right forum, is to produce some tools to leverage those communities.

Some ideas:

1. Working infrastructure for chatrooms etc

2. A curriculum for people to go through

3. The most important thing, I think, is to have those weekly classes to tune into so the people adopt the rhythm.

And whatever other ideas all the smart HN readers might suggest following this.

Edit: Someone should submit this as one of the projects!
In the context of healthcare, the shared responsibility provisions are often called job killing:

https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/questions-...

It's more expensive to have 50 employees than 49.

Also, a green card doesn't really expire, people overstay travel and work permits. A green card is for immigrants that have permanent permission to stay.

Immigration policy certainly has lots of discretionary enforcement. DACA is a big example. I think it's reasonable and the right thing to do, but it is discretionary enforcement of immigration law.
In a nutshell, where a "sensible" person (engineering manager, engineer, founder..) is involved in front line recruiting (i.e they search, they look at applications), your projects are valuable. I found that in a lot of cases such people have a bias against resumes and will only consider candidates with side projects and a github profile. Mostly these would be early stage startups and some growth stage and large companies that believe in side projects.

Where "recruiters" and "recruiting systems" do front line recruiting, projects don't matter. They're pattern matching resumes and looking for specific things they're told to look for. These would be growth stage startups and large companies, generally companies that hire in volumes and don't have the time or patience to holistically look at candidates.

In short: don't work on projects just to showcase your skills and get hired - hiring is a crap shoot. Work on them because you love working on them, and believe that the world could benefit from them no matter how small.
Very good points. Any insight as to how Palantir learned so much about its customers' problems? Does Palantir employ a good number of its customers' former analysts, etc.? Just curious how this is done so well in practice.

[edit: clarity]
>the (few) libertarian sources that are considering basic income

While it's not necessarily popular in libertarian circles today, the negative income tax (which is closely related to UBI but not identical) has a long history among libertarian thought leaders. Milton Friedman was a proponent of these policies.

The US already has the Earned Income Tax Credit, so the basic idea of a negative income tax is already in place though highly constrained. I think expanding/modifying that program would be a path of least resistance rather than pushing for independent UBI legislation.
It's a new trend, and to date the reporting has been so strong that it will take more than a few Thiel stories to tip the balance.

I'm hoping they come to their senses. They've been doing a lot of "in group" focused stories, which are very annoying. I think most rational readers don't want in-group stories they want solid reporting and clear analysis.

Sure, most people who want to read Greenwald's reporting about the surveillance state also don't mind reading a story implicating Thiel in the overreach, but that doesn't mean they ought to stoop to the level of calling out Tiel and not calling out the A list investors, established larger firms, and government officials who are all part of the reason we should all be concerned about the likely misuse of Palantir's (and a lot of other) tech.

To be fair, The Intercept does great investigative journalism, but as a whole does not position itself as a completely objective source. There are a fair number of "awareness" oriented stories published, and even a few rants. Rants can be very informative but it's important to differentiate them from what is supposed to be unbiased/objective news or analysis.

Sadly, clickbait-oriented metrics likely suggest to the editors of all news-ish publications that the in-group stories are what readers demand.
Pedantic note: I'm sure under 1. Technical Skills, the "I think this is out of the question here" should read "I think there's no question about this" or something along those lines.