skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You see the benefits of regulation but not the costs

In my defense, I plainly asked about the outcomes and the costs. My point is that we need serious information, not more speculation.

The parent comment omits the costs of a lack of regulation, such as sickness for diners, spread of disease, injury for workers, etc. But the question is not can we speculatively come up with costs and benefits, but how much do these things actually cost and benefit us?

> This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post

I didn't say that. I said there is no well-known information. Could you point to some?

> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value

I don't agree at all. In fact, government performs much that helps business produce value. Look at the benefits from NASA, medical research, scientific research (Albert Einstein wasn't a private entrepreneur) ... fracking, IIRC, is the product of government research, as is much of the energy industry ... the entire foundation of the Internet and web is mostly from government institutions (ARPA, CERN, U of Illinois, and many more). And for much of the period of the West's greatest growth, the 1950s and 1960s, government ran businesses, and regulated and taxed at rates that seem astronomical today.

Government also provides (produces) systems of laws, regulations, roads, security, education, health, and other things that are absolutely necessary for and greatly enhance business. Without education and health, who would be working for the businesses and buying their goods? Without roads, how would they ship? Without law and regulation, who would feel safe buying from them and how would disputes be resolved? Without the military, how would international shipping lanes supply all those goods?
You forgot the big guns: Google and Facebook, who literally exploit small publishers and individual content creators. They are killing journalism and content creation, and all for the ever escalating profit.

(I run a med tech website that reports on medical technologies for doctors and med professionals. I am an MD. We are publishing every day since 2004. News, interviews and exclusive reports. We have a half a million page views a month from professional readership, and Google pays us pennies for Adsense. $60/day? WTF!)
Miegakure looks amazing! I've wanted to play for years now.

In my pessimistic moments I think it's even money which will release first: Half-Life 3 or Miegakure...
They give flight vouchers, but they often have other direct expenses like hotel accommodations and food.

The last time I was bumped it was ~$600 airline voucher, transportation to/from a ski resort (a perk of being bumped in the mountains!), a room for the night and a good meal voucher to cover dinner and breakfast the next day. Plus they still flew me out the next day and took care of rebooking the connection on another airline. I don't know exactly how much it cost them, but I made out like a bandit.
This is what makes most propaganda devastating.

What you are talking about is "white propaganda": telling the truth but in a manner that creates a useful perception.

This is unfortunately the basis of most information and news media today, as even "free" media industries compete to tell the stories and gain the access of intelligence and national security reporting (how we got the Iraq War propaganda in the US, how today the media industry is spreading "Russia did everything" nonsense, the current media sprint repeating propaganda about the situation in North Korea and the DPRK government's intentions).

> So now the counter-propagandist is put in the difficult position of arguing against the publishing of the truth, not a particular nice place to be, rhetorically.

Exactly.

I would emphasize that "truth" is not a binary thing but a highly contextual and multidimensional device. Merely changing a headline or picture sets tone and dramatically alters perception - add to that editing, media campaigning, social media astroturfing, selective synonym choice...

"Perception management" is an regular propaganda term employed by the Department of Defense for this reason. The facts can be useful, but ultimately the objective is to change minds and decision making and to affect outcomes. And so you may be the subject of perception management that utilizes (aspects of) truth.

The most effective way of countering propaganda is to seek nuance when presented with characterizations, try to understand dispassionately the situation from every side, and to be skeptical of especially the things that you most routinely would like to agree.

Ironically this usually means consuming more propaganda on purpose: specifically looking for the narrative position of the United States, Russia, Britain, China, etc on various issues. This is also why it's an extremely good idea to read international news from all parties in a conflict during the entire duration of an event (e.g. Syrian Civil-Proxy War).
It's hard to just say "fuck it" when literally 4/5 of your discussions about prospective employment immediately terminate once the person on the other end finds out you were fired.
(That is, until you think up a radically different way of explaining it to people).
Mexico due to a new and simpler clandestine process, not Big Pharma.
Presume much?
Judging by your comment, you don't know very much about contracting in the IC. I'd rather you be less authoritative and leave it at "I think X" instead of "It's definitely X".
Let's chat about it over email ;)
I am sure we can help.

Also we announced today our on-prem solution
https://www.3scale.net/2017/04/go-anywhere-api-management-3s...
Beautiful quote from him in the article:

When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history.

Many of these directives are contradictory. The coexistence of these contradictory programs is what we call inner conflict. This conflict causes us to constantly check ourselves while we are caught in the opposition of polarity. Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration.

To complicate matters, the programs are reinforced by fear. Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap.

What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs. When LSD is used intentionally it enables you to see all the tracks laid down, to explore each one intensely. It also allows you to see the many parallel and redundant programs as well as the contradictory ones.

It allows you to see the underlying unity of all opposites in the magic play of existence. This allows you to edit these programs and recreate superior programs that give you the insight to shake loose the restrictions and conflicts programmed into each one of us by our parents, our religion, our early education, and by society as a whole.

---

Very much in line with what recent neuroscience results are finding:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46421

http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-reveal-how-lsd-affect...
It seems fairly obvious to me that a wooden sailing ship, even built by hand with old technology, would be far easier to construct than a moon rocket.

It's hard to compare costs across such a great gulf of time, but consider for example that the Spanish Armada consisted of 130 ships, and was fielded by a country of about 8 million people at the time. If a 16th-century ship cost as much as a moon rocket today, then that would be roughly like the USA building 5,000 moon rockets. Moon rockets probably cost about $1 billion or so (Saturn V was a bit under in current dollars, SLS will be quite a bit over) so that would be about $5 trillion. Less than a decade later, Spain was able to throw another 140 ships at the English, so it wasn't a one-off thing either. And that's ignoring naval or merchant ships that didn't participate in the Armada.

I'd wager the ships were much more expensive than the crew at the time. Human life was quite cheap until recently (and still is in many/most parts of the world). A couple hundred man-years of of skilled laborers versus a couple hundred random nobodies?
I was in a similar spot. Studied Math/Stats, and my friends were not in tech. I've made some now, but still don't have many really good friends in tech. It seems studying CS can be a real group activity, where you work together on assignments/apps/job prep. I missed out on that - just finished a job search & prep that was completely solo after working on apps completely solo.

Going to local meetups helps but it's probably leaving you unsatisfied due to the low frequency. Some suggestions that worked for me:

- Keep an eye out for local tech companies you want to work for or just like: some might host open houses, or sponsor hackathons. You may hear about this through Meetup.com but not always
- I'm betting Chicago has a Slack dev group. I'm in the Slack dev group for where I am now and where I'm going to move, and it's a good way to stay connected, ask questions, and absorb discussion that you want but aren't getting in your day-to-day
- If you have any interest in volunteering, look for things like Ladies Learning Code and the like going on in your area. Usually the mentors there who want to help young kids are established in the industry. You can go, help younger generations with what you know, with an added benefit of getting to know other mentors, who may help you down the line.

This is a phase in your life that will pass once you start working in the field. I know it may feel hard right now, but hopefully this piece of advice helps (which I found true for me, and I hear from others in the industry): your "outsider"-ness can be spun into a benefit. You see the tech world through different eyes, you come unhinged without biases. And, being fresh and without experience, you will be hungrier, more persistent, and more willing to learn something new than somebody who has roots and comfort zones.

Once you pass through this phase and "make it", don't forget to give back when called upon; you will now be "that" person in this network comprised of non-tech people, in a world that is ubiquitous with tech.
“We got the whole prison stoned, this is what freedom is really about. It’s not about not being in chains, it’s about not having your mind enslaved,” Nick declared.
Maybe Google should hire him back.
I can tick a lot of those. Never gave me any particular angst.
I wonder if it's a correlation/causality type thing. Someone getting fired might be more likely to get fired again which messes with the data somewhat. I'd also wager that romantic rejection is something the average person experiences much more frequently than employment rejection.
Given the reason that airlines employ overselling, you would have to expect that it would impact the airline profitability, which could in theory lead to an increase in ticket prices. The bet SWA is making is that the revenue gain from overbooking is smaller than the consequential losses from bad publicity. Just think about the downside to United based on their share price alone, and now the increased focus that is on the 'good conduct' w.r.t bumping passengers in the light of it.

The maths of overbooking is that if you have 100 bookings on a 100 seater flight and 97 passengers show up then perhaps you could have sold 103 tickets and still not have to bump anyone. In this case you have increased revenue by 3% without an increase in costs. This can either manifest itself in an increased profit or, on a competitive route, lower ticket prices.

Of course, there will be variations in the number of people who show up and this can lead to more passengers arriving at the airport than there are seats on the plane. In this case, there is a cost to the airline, and perhaps in this big optimisation problem there are some airlines that see a bigger payoff in overbooking and bumping than avoiding overselling and minimising bumping.

I don't know about budget airlines, but full service you might expect somewhere in the region of 5% overselling. For budget, I would expect it to be higher as tickets are cheaper so passengers have less to lose by not showing up.

Nonetheless, even if it were a 1-2% increase in revenue, it would have a much higher impact on profitability. On a budget route, you could have $500 profit per flight, say a couple of dollars per passenger. Every extra ticket that gets sold that the airline doesn't have to pay costs for is a big deal, and part of the optimisations that allow airlines to offer lower fares.
I would like to point out that if you write code like this (that is, creating a temporary object only to have it instantly deleted), your code smells.

Backwards-compatibility notwithstanding, it would not be totally illogical for C++ to allow optimizing out construct-destruct chains even in the presence of side effects, in a similar manner to the existing copy elision behavior. After all, the object is unused, and the destructor should be merely undoing whatever the constructor did, so afterward it should be as if the object was never constructed.

If you rely on the side effects of normal construction, that's not so different from relying on the side effects of copy construction, which you can't already do. Hence you shouldn't do the first either.

So yes, it's a bug, and needs to be fixed, but regardless of that, you shouldn't write code like this in the first place.

EDIT: See comment below, apparently the bug comes up in more cases than those I referred to here.
>that empty seat doesn't mean you can take less fuel

I was under the impression that the fuel load for each flight is calculated based on a formula that averages the weight for each passenger and their expected luggage. Fewer passengers than expected = more fuel left over after the flight.
I am always startled by people who hate inheritance "lock stock and barrel". I have long-running memories of being utterly appalled by multiple inheritance - all the way back to having to learn how to answer those damn "how many pure virtual base classes can dance on the head of a pin?" type questions in my 3rd-year C++/soft-eng class.

But single inheritance, used judiciously, has really led to some vastly better designs in my experience and doing away with inheritance would generally mean those designs would just be redone with a clumsy "let's fake up inheritance" interface.

I think you can write bad code in any language. Bad C++ is especially egregious, as it's possible to make the bad code practically incomprehensible even at a surface level. However, I suspect that carving feature after feature away from C++ leaves a language that is now just as good for writing toy programs ("hey, look how elegant the language is now that pesky inheritance/template/exception/<insert hated feature of choice> is gone"), but will now allow you write verbose and shitty (but shallowly more understandable) code in place of the C++.

I do find the sheer size of C++ objectionable (the usual arguments about how nearly all C++ programmers seem to program in subset "house styles" of the language). I am generally very suspicious of efforts to replace C++ that come from people who don't seem to understand it at all, however. Generally I like Rust in this regard as the Rust approach seems to display a mature understanding of what was actually good about C++ (constrast: Go).
Would you mind elaborating?
Facial Recognition and Holy Land Images
I'm an Alaska Airlines loyalist, I don't like the "flying bus" approach to boarding.
This looks incredible for starting to understand web content in useful ways. Will definitely give this a try for a product I'm building.
PC manufacturers have tiny margins, maybe 2% on average (not including Apple of course). The Surface line has been a gun pointed at their heads. I'm not sure why MSFT is doing it, it can't be profitable and even if it was they can't switch their business model to Apples without huge dislocations.

Since windows pc makers have essentially lost the ability to do much R&D and Design because of their brutal margins, I could see the Surface line as a way for MSFT to take over design for the entire market, and give the manufacturers better hardware designs. But why isn't that happening?
Would you agree that the Nash equilibrium is not identically equal to the global utility optimum? If so, then you almost certainly agree that what is best for an individual actor is not necessarily what is best for Society (all people in a political aggregate) at large.

In plain terms, everyone acting selfishly does not necessarily lead to everyone getting what they need.
"systems" is an overloaded term and I wish Rustaceans would stop using it or add some qualifiers to manage the ambiguity. I mean, GoodbyeEarl says it right there:

You can write a system in any language right?

Sure, if you're a kernel developer (or rust user) then you might know what "systems language" means more precisely and that phrase makes it easier for you to communicate with other kernel developers, but it loses its' value as a "distinct meaningful element of speech" (define: word) when the context includes almost anyone else.

Hell, even the definition of "System programming language" on Wikipedia[1] is ambiguous enough that many GC'd or even scripting languages would fit it.

So lets stop using just bare "systems language" to describe rust. It deserves better. Newcomers faceplanting into the 10-story granite wall that is the borrow checker is bad enough, there's no reason they should be confused by the tagline on the homepage.

You can write a system in any language right?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming_language
Some sleazebag at Uber hired him exactly for that reason. Levandowski got caught. The question is how deep does this trail go?
Seattle is higher density than Houston, but it's not keeping up with demand in areas of high-demand. That's part of why so many people are getting priced out of their neighborhoods (especially around Capitol Hill)... an expanded and improved transportation network would help, but I understand the city is shackled by the county on that...
A lot of the compromises made in Rust syntax were to make it much, much easier for the compiler to reduce passes to compile into a syntax tree.

There are certainly some things that should just be obvious now, though. Using the C++ namespace separator of :: is just ludicrously obtuse for an extremely common symbol, using the & for refs is archaic (I mean... you could have just called it a ref. ref T instead of &T. And then just ref(foo) or foo.ref to get a ref to foo.) And the syntax for lifetimes is horrible, with the 'a and the fact that in practice its about as significant as naming parameters in a C++ function definition in a header (ie, pointless - the words are discarded by the compiler every time).

And I certainly would have argued for whitespace significance, at least as an option, instead of classic semicolon spam.

Given all that, Rust is still, IMO, the best programming language we have right now for native performance, period. We can criticize what we don't like but we should at least agree its the best we have.
It took me a while but I believe they mean "doggy".
Why Silicon Valley Should Get Behind Universal Health Care
Show HN: Komposto – Sketchbook of self-modifying programs
There is no "win" for the consumer here, same as when airlines decide to re-provide free food or free checked bags - these things get baked into the price of tickets, nothing is free. They are marketing. Rather than spend a million on ads, they spend a million on less efficient flights (by not overbooking), but hopefully getting more customers than ads would have gotten given this is a hot-button topic.
Great Data Visuals Displaying Causes of Death
Like the channel 4 news gang, our good friends at Demand Progress have officially re-assembled the ol' gang to relaunch, "Battle for the Net" (www.battleforthenet.com), today. This is the same team that helped spearhead the 2015 campaign that successfully changed Chairman Wheeler's mind to protect the Internet as a Utility. They've already collected over 800 startup signatures (including our own) and is now gearing up for an intense war with Trump's administration and the ISP heavyweights.... again.
There is a demo GIF in README on the github repository if you'd like to watch:

https://github.com/fatiherikli/komposto.org
While I generally agree -- Southwest is more of a budget airline, so it may not be subject to the same magnitude of loss from people missing/skipping their flights. I could see the United demographic having far more no-shows.

For those who aren't aware, airlines overbook because there are, on average, a significant number of people who miss or skip their flights. It's wasteful (and bad business) to leave those seats empty when instead, you can overbook and have an extremely low percentage of flights end up without enough seats.

Edit: as others mentioned, overbooking also allows airlines to be more flexible with refunds.
The reason that checking in earlier doesn't get you the first spot in line isn't that the tickets go really fast like concert tickets. It's because customers who are on a connecting flight can check in 24 hours before their first flight and therefore more than 24 hours before their connection, giving them priority. I almost always have a better seat on my second flight than my first on Southwest.

This isn't a bad strategy by them as it tends to give better seats to people on long itineraries who have been waiting around, and since those people fly long distances they are also high-value customers.
How is it that the doctor was already seated when they "volunteered" him to not fly? That seems like the main fuck-up to me.

It is. Different parts of FAA rules and even United's contract of carriage apply once you're boarded. Overbooking doesn't even apply here - the doctor had a reserved confirmed seat.
That's not really an argument. Profits could have been even higher if they had leveraged overbooking. And some of Ryanair's tickets are certainly below marginal costs - making me wonder if really all fights pay for themselves that easily.

My guess why they don't use overbooking: it's really complicated. Both finding the right balance of overbooking as well as managing the procedures at the airport. Ryanair has simply decided in favor of simplicity forgoing some additional revenue