skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying all abstractions are bad. The problem is adding abstractions when they're not actually needed, which increases complexity instead of reducing it.
I haven't used them, but it looks compelling: https://www.packet.net/
Show HN: Built with Shopify – IndieHackers for ecommerce stores using Shopify
A lot of those are poor examples because the gap between s peasant and a professional soldier has become much larger over time, particularly over the last century.
Here's one: as a US citizen living in Canada, I'm unable to invest in ETFs in Canada (e.g. Vanguard Canada's S&P500) without suffering punitive taxes and onerous reporting to the IRS. If it's an active investment, then it's fine, it's taxed as normal.
Besides "milk men", there were "ice men" who would deliver ice to homes. [0] Demand for ice delivery turned into a major exterior feature of early 20th century homes, and you can still find small ice doors mysteriously adorning the Victorians of SF.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceman_(occupation)
You might want to pick up Kelly's biography, where you can read about how easy it was for him :-) Kelly also had a bunch of siblings who are forgotten by history.

People (especially in America) have choices about their path in life. They are not hapless victims of circumstance and do not follow preordained paths.
Opportunity – Adobe Hiring
We are currently hiring in India (Bangalore) who have expertise in developing platforms (Serverless technology). Please email me your resume with contact details at deekgupt@adobe.com if you are looking for a challenging and an exciting opportunity with Adobe.
The iPad Turnaround Is Coming
Yes, exactly, the author confuses the term OTA versus a metasearch engine. Expedia and Priceline are the largest OTA's after consolidation in recent years, creating what is now a duopoly. Furthermore, Expedia and Priceline have created an illusion of choice by acquiring the majority of the high traffic metasearch sites and then deciding to maintain their separate brands.

Disclaimer: I built a flight search tool, https://concorde.io
To Mock or Not to Mock? An Empirical Study on Mocking Practice [pdf]
APFS Performance Lags HFS+, for Now
Yeah, I noticed this for the first time a few weeks ago when I was ordering one. Their time estimates are already pretty horrific in Midtown NYC traffic, assigning me to someone that is "5 minutes away" from dropping someone off "5 minutes away" from me can easily be 15+ minutes of wall clock time before a car gets there.
This is a technique called squeezing, it in no way violates our fundamental understanding of physics. Heisenberg uncertainty is generally: 1/2ћ ≤ ΔxΔp. If you measure something in a way that you have complete uncertainty in the quantity p then you can have arbitrarily fine resolution in x.

It's interesting, but squeezing is a common technique, and this headline misrepresents the importance of this experiment.
> Some local managers who were men went so far as to adopt a female persona for texting drivers, having found that the uptake was higher when they did. [...] Uber acknowledged that it had experimented with female personas to increase engagement with drivers.

Classic. Men are predictable, and Uber is predictably amoral.
For me, the main frustration has been that Google has its one keyboard (Gboard) for latin languages and then the Japanese IME as separate keyboards. I use English, French, and Japanese keyboards and switch between pretty often, but it's a bit of a pain.

There's noticable lag when switching keyboards that seem endemic in the model of "multiple app keyboards", whereas a more integrated experience would benefit some

Agreed that the "Play Store" model is better for consumers on phones that don't get updates (been there). I hope they try to pull stuff into the core project as well, though. Kinda sad to see Android becoming what people always thought it would end up (a Google-centric venture)
That particular example happens to work, but 1/7 + 1/7 != 2/7.

DecFP is not magic. You still need to know that you're dealing with limited precision numbers under the hood.
Please see the FAQ regarding job posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

For the latest post, see https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

Next post is tomorrow Monday. Wait and repost this in the correct thread.
> They had great pilots and great aircraft at the start of the war

A handful. Nowhere near enough. The Battle of Midway wiped out the bulk of them. The Zero rapidly became obsolete, too.
Absolutely terrible. I suppose the lesson here is to make sure your kids get a flu shot.
Not employees. Free agents, totally independent contractors.
The Naked Ape
> they have you explicitly waive your right to a class action

Almost certainly not going to be upheld by a court if there is evidence of fraud.

> Also the terms of service makes it very clear that the speeds they quote on their ads are essentially entirely theoretical.

Completely irrelevant if you can prove that they purposefully implemented a scheme to throttle your speeds.
Nubsio GPIO API – A Windows USB interface for controlling external devices
I have a limited setback on my house and I swear when I replaced their combo router I stopped having people (late at night eating burgers and listening to loud music while browsing) randomly parked in front of my house (presumably they got signal on the street).

I'll never go back to that configuration again so it's not like I can retest.
This is solved by the Scheme numerical tower, which prefers exact representation​s (including exact rationals) unless inexact representation is explicitly requested or forced by an operation that doesn't support exact results.
I've noticed this so much that I've recently started a spreadsheet of estimated arrival times, actual arrival times, estimated trip duration, and actual trip duration. I currently only have 4 entries so the results don't really hold weight (though right now the average wait is ~4 minutes estimated with ~12 minutes actual). Uber's time estimates have been simply atrocious lately.
The Way We Teach Math Is Holding Women Back
That is a good idea: to do it in Slack even if no one is there. Forces you to slow down and be conscious of what you are doing.
> Crispr/Cas9 is not as robust as people make it out to be, but it's promising. (I do some work with crispr/cas9)

Please expand on this. I feel like CRISPR is being overhyped, and would love to hear form someone educated on the subject as to what its possible limitations are, or at least some of the known challenges ahead.
People (especially in America) have choices about their path in life. They are not hapless victims of circumstance and do not follow preordained paths.

Your thesis is that they do: "They are born that way."

It's probably best to agree to disagree as to how much someone at the bottom can influence their situation in the modern day. You're talking about nearly a century ago.
I just gave a DOCSIS 3.0 modem to a friend who was paying $7 per month on a DOCSIS 2 modem that couldn't provide the subscribed speed. Comcast had already charged her for a couple of truck rolls to troubleshoot the speeds, so it boggles my mind why the rented modem had not been replaced.

Even more interesting is that Comcast does have infrastructure in place to notify customers of these issues, though I have only seen them use it to convert customers who bought equipment back to renting. When I bumped my modem into the D3.1 threshold last year, the company made a number of calls to let me know that I could improve my experience by going back on a rental plan.
My family doctor's office in Canada would refer us to a nurse phone consultation before even giving us an appointment for our daughter. Here you have to exaggerate, she was having 38.3 C and the nurse insisted that anything less than 38.5 is not considered fever, and only after 3 days of fever while treated with acetaminophen/ibuprofen she would be eligible for a consult.

The cold or flue lasted 9 days, with fever coming and going, we took her one day to the walk-in clinic. I understand they don't want a million children collapsing the system but let's say I wasn't happy.
Have you ever spoken to a surgeon or pilot? Both are probably more disgruntled than the average Uber driver.
> In the trades, they generally get apprentices to do work at full chargeout (with guidance) with final signoff from certified person.

And this is why I generally do the work myself rather than getting a tradie in. If I want someone inexperienced to give it a go and probably screw up, I'll screw it up myself on a Saturday afternoon rather than paying $120/hr for someone else to screw it up. At least after that I know how to fix it next time.
This has been my experience as well.

Chatbots in China over WeChat act as a lightweight Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, which is highly successful due to a set of market factors which are (at least from my perspective) unique to China.

But, as I've been saying for about a year now, chatbots, in their current incarnation, don't make a lot of sense outside that niche.

Looking at it from either the American or Japanese perspective, there are a set of expected standards for customer support, which are either already met via web-based mostly-automated systems (Amazon is really good here), or by being able to directly chat with a human being (perhaps supplemented by AI) to solve a very specific and usually uncommon need.

Replacing that setup with nothing but a text-based IVR system is a non-starter for any company that wants to remain in business.
They also sweeten the deal so that if you cancel more than 5 minutes AFTER you accept the fare, they still charge you a cancellation fee.

So, they give you a pie-in-the-sky estimate, you wait ten minutes, realize it's still gonna be an extra 10 minutes and then cancel because you can grab a taxi right there and they want to charge you a cancellation fee.

I understood that when they were at least close on their estimate times, but now it just seems like they're intentionally being difficult.
Derides people for not going into a STEM career.

Trash talks people who are trying to go into a STEM career.
Exploiting Time for Causal Inference with Difference-In-Differences
> Going back to the beginning, you claimed that unions can negotiate closed shops

This is a rather pedantic quibble. In the US, "closed shop" refers to post-entry closed shops, which are legal (except in states with right-to-work laws), as opposed to pre-entry closed shops (which is what Taft-Hartley outlawed nationwide).

Despite that ban, unions can still use tactics like hiring halls (even contractually mandated ones) to simulate the effects of a pre-entry closed shop, while still technically not running afoul of the letter of Taft-Hartley, but undermining the clear intent of it.

> No, those statements aren't equivalent. Plenty of other negotiations see parties authorize their representatives to agree to terms within certain parameters. Plenty of contracts commit the parties to accept the result of some process.

You're missing the point, which is that unions can compel people who never entered a contract with the union or authorized the union as their representative, as long as that person is a member of a bargaining unit for which the union has secured majority representation.
Combining streams in RxJs
Show HN: Mental Health Pop Up
“There are over 2,000 open issues.” – Steam for Linux's GitHub bug tracker
When the driver is on another trip the app tells you "Joe is completing another trip".

I don't think this feature has much to do with behavioral science, more to do with combating the previous behavior which was drivers starting a Lyft ride as they get near the end of a Uber trip and vice versa.
Isn't that the case anywhere in the U.S. though? Don't local politics always reflect the cultures and opinions of those doing the voting? Isn't that by intentional design?
I've always wanted a nag for my navigator turn directions:

"Ya shoulda tarned bak dare, ya fakkin twit! Now you're making me recalculate! Whazza matta wit ya?"
Who have no control over their work schedule or fares among other things. They're technically contractors but the super court in California has ruled otherwise.
i wonder if you could dispute through credit card. they would have paid more for such stupid system.
Clickbait headline, I'd say. The experiment fully agrees with known quantum mechanics. (Nevertheless, it is an impressive technical achievement.)

The authors of the original Nature article say that "spins obey non-Heisenberg uncertainty relations", which is true if "Heisenberg uncertainty relation" is (narrowly) defined as the uncertainty relation for position and momentum, Δx⋅Δp ≥ ħ/2. But since spins don't have position and momentum, they are not expected to observe this uncertainty relation anyway. The more general uncertainty relation for any two observables A and B reads ΔA⋅ΔB ≥ |⟨[A,B]⟩|/2 (where [A,B]=AB-BA is the commutator, and ⟨⟩ is the expectation value) and for spins which have three components Sx, Sy, Sz the commutator is [Sx,Sy]=iħSz etc, therefore the uncertainty relation for two spin components reads ΔSx⋅ΔSy ≥ ħ/2⋅|⟨Sz⟩|, hence it does not seem so surprising that it can be made rather small if the expectation value of the third spin component can be made small.

Edit: typo
They usually refund the cancel fee if you ask. I've had issues with both uber and lyft where cancel fees were charged when I wasn't at fault (driver went to wrong place, etc) and just reported and got refunded.
they probably control their work schedule, but not fare?
"Seems if you're crazy enough..."

Why is this crazy? It's a very important job that actually contributes to society. I have much respect for T-men, Linemen, and Sub Techs.
In Uber's defense, the article doesn't mention much or anything that isn't covered in Business 101.

Encouraging drivers to locate in busy areas does not require behavioral science.
I do the same thing, but still end up with extra at the end of the weekend. When traveling in Europe I noticed a lot of places have small tablespoon servings of UHT milk in little cartons. I wish we had something like that here, but all I can I find are stuff like "mini moos" which are too heavy.
In Canada there is no capital gains tax on primary residences. In the US, $500k is exempt. I imagine the laws are similar in most parts of the world, no?
MOBA: Museum of Bad Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art
This makes me think that drivers aren't the only ones whose mental circuitry Uber is trying to master. "Well well well, looks like users don't notice if our ETA is off by 10 minutes as long as we show them an interactive map..."
He is. He was even a bishop in his church for a while. I've met him a few times. He's probably the nicest guy in the entire world.
I'm neither a democrat nor a republican, I just think that the things he says are what a chump who thinks he has useful answers because he wrote a popular comic would say.
It's not just the headline. Sentences like this are false:

> ...measure the spin precession rate much more accurately than previously thought possible.

since no one thought different.
I BOUGHT 100 COFFEE CUPS
Another reason to never live somewhere with an HOA.
That's part, but not all. Flu shots are far from perfect and are based on imperfect predictions of which strains would be dominant.

We've got an in office test and anti-virals that are effective in, respectively, identifying and reducing the intensity and duration of flu infections. But you've got to see the doctor for a definitive diagnosis and prescription very shortly after symptoms appear for Tamiflu to be effective.
Couriers on horses seemed to work for U.S. militias in the past.
Requests: HTTP for Humans
HE ACROSS THE COUNTRY JUST FOR THESE GLASSES?
That seems extraordinarily unfair to the developing countries, especially if it becomes something that people do en masse.
> As we shall see, a single variable – having a criminal record – is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.

Although Ctrl-F shows me a few hits for "criminal" here, I see no substantive discussion of what is arguably the article's tl;dr.

That is, with admittedly some license taken, it is arguably the bloody War Against Drugs that has been destroying the US economy and culture.
Apropos link: http://cnqzu.com/library/Anarchy%20Folder/Fiction/Stephenson...

I remember reading that some years ago and wondering if it was like condensed milk (which would probably be pretty awful on Captain Crunch cereal). Now, I think the cereal might be the key thing to hide the flavor of UHT milk.
Depends on your threshold for annoying. While there are terrible ads, I think Youtube is okay. And I don't see it as an arms race at all. It could be a win/win situation.

For companies, getting people to watch video ads is a win. For content creators, it's a win cause they get paid. For Youtube, it's a win cause they have a revenue stream. For viewers, it's a win because they don't have to pay anything.

The problem is in many cases, if you did want to pay, either to get rid of ads or to support content creators in a greater way, there's not much choice. (Which is puzzling as for a walled garden like Youtube the solution is much, much simpler than for the web.)
I don't think that is very plausible, nothing to stop Australians working as long as they like.

The retirees in Australia seem to be playing a lot of golf, travelling and looking after their grand children, to make a gross generalisation.
Exactly. These algorithms are not "picking" stocks so much as tracking stocks.

This is a story about investor behavior.
William Kahan, who's the person mainly responsible for IEEE 754, has a critique of Gustafson's proposal:

http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/UnumSORN.pdf

IEEE 754 is not a trivial standard (it earned Kahan a Turing award). Error modes for IEEE 754 are precisely defined, even though it requires a lot of effort to understand what they mean. (For example, overflow triggers an exception, but gradual underflow is allowed.) Going beyond it requires some serious effort, and unums seem not to be the solution.

A good book to understand the IEEE 754 standard is the book by Michael Overton. The quoted article is unfortunately an example of floating-point "scaremongering". Floating point arithmetic is not approximate, it is accurately defined with precise error modes. Base-10 arithmetic is not however, the model to understand it, but rather "units in last place".
Thanks for mentioning this.

I've stopped using Uber because this happened to me the last 4 times I've tried to book one.

I feel like it's bait and switch. I have better luck to just walk toward a busy road and hail a taxi.
One tax advantage to approximating an index with individual stock positions is "tax loss harvesting": sell one stock at a loss and buy an equivalent. e.g., sell Coke and buy Pepsi. An advisor told me that you can add ~1% to your after tax returns. You need sufficiently large positions such that rebalancing transaction fees are negligible.
Not if it is their fault/equipment.
I know this sounds naive and stupid and maybe even glib, but I just don't understand how and why something like this could happen.

How could anyone be complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in a single day, not even just in a moral sense but even in a physical sense. How does the body not shut down when confronted with the horror of such a thing?

If someone was shot in the head as I watched, even if I knew there was zero danger of being shot myself, I know that my body would react with pure revulsion and I would find it hard to stand up, much less take part. It seems it would just be an evolved response, something intrinsic.

But these men just slaughtered thousands of people like pigs - how? Why?
For example, IQ only correlates with chess ability for novice players. This correlation disappears by the master level.

Ok, but how many master-level players have average or lower IQs?
I watched a Testing Talk recently that said that our response to stress and not stress itself is the killer. How accurate it's the claim.
Serta office chair
My friend's reaction upon seeing Adobe SDK: “This is the ugliest shit ever”
As of a couple weeks ago, you can buy a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. Supposedly they have AQM (i.e. bufferbloat mitigation). I don't know for sure, but I expect that the upstream AQM will work even if the ISP hasn't switched to DOCSIS 3.1 in your area.
Why are people with poor performance reviews barred from transferring? You'd think it would be encouraged; someone who struggles in one team may thrive in another.
Some Fake News About Me from Bloomberg: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/158709087061/some-fake-news-abo...
> Not sure why the author thinks travel agents are useless. You don't (or shouldn't be) paying them so it's not like only the rich benefit.

My employer pays for ours. They've never found a cheaper fare than I've found, and we pay them per person per flight booked. This is the first year that they haven't proposed a flight/hotel stay combo that wasn't anything like what I specified.

As far as I can tell, they're just a way to make sure that higher-level sales folks don't book a $3k 2-hour flight that includes a masseuse.
Yes, but they only point that out AFTER you've requested the ride.

They give you 3 times that are all not the same thing (but are obviously insinuated to be).

1) It gives you the 3 minute estimate.
2) Then says that Joe is completing a ride 5 minutes away
3) And then he drops the person and they say he's 5 minutes away (this is 5 minutes after you initially requested).

You could make a case that they're technically not lying because [1] is an estimate, [2] is a truth and [3] is the actual, real ETA but the whole thing is obviously confusing, deceitful and makes for a terrible user experience.
Little Tropical Fish with a Big, Venomous Bite
Sure, but the value of a stock isn't tied to what I will be paid from it through dividends or whatever- its the value of what I and all future holders of the stock can expect to be paid. How long I hold the stock, and how much of those dividends I personally receive, is not an important factor.
Many, many years ago, when I was thinking of moving, I was looking for salary ranges for a particular American city. It was pre-Glassdoor so there wasn't a website that aggregated that information.

I decided to go the HackerNews of that particular industry, except instead of using my own account, I decided to make a fake one with an avatar of an attractive but non-famous female. Basically it looked like it was a genuine personal photograph rather than a professionally shot photo you would've found in a magazine. I basically posted one post, introducing myself and asked if anyone had an idea of salary ranges for that city given a specific job position.

Holy. Crap. The number of replies I got was unbelievable. I think on average threads on that news site had double digit responses but this one had over 100. I even had people private message me to say they wanted to interview me despite not including any links to a personal website or resume.
Methamphetamine