skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author is very short on arguments and misleading. He presents a truth that fits his mentality but not reality and is very unsound and shallow. Therefore I feel he is criminally insane and a good fit for the Arkham Asylum.
Just because income increases, doesn't mean it's worth the effort. Why work hard to make 200k, when your 100k job nets only 25k a year less?

Some jobs are all or nothing, but a lot aren't.
None of the efficiency of CDMA matters from a customer experience standpoint. If it couldn't do simultaneous voice and data then it was inferior technology.
The crux of the author's argument is "People will have less incentive to work which is bad." And hey, I actually agree that people should work regardless of whether UBI is enough for them to sustain a decent quality of life. OP pointed out a number of good - primarily social - reasons why people should be going to work.

However, OP's conclusion was "therefore UBI is a bad idea" and never considered what society could be like if we all collected UBI and maintained similar unemployment we (in the US) have today.

My vision is that we collect UBI and have mandatory employment for X years and Y% allowed "time off / sabbatical / whatever" during which you are granted UBI. During the days/weeks/months you exceed the allowed time off, you are not granted UBI.

Of course, the policy needs to be far more nuanced with regard to people who are unable to work, unable to find work, attempting to help people find work in their field of expertise, etc.

I've never spoken to anyone about this concept at length, so I'd love to hear HN's thoughts.
Are there any real studies done in this field that factor in which percentage of the population has to be working for the system to be sustainable? And what would be the most reasonable source of funding this project?

I'll admit it, the idea to be paid to do nothing is completely strange to me, and my basic instinct tells me that unemployment would skyrocket, but I'm willing to forego all of that if the system proves to be more efficient and slashes the total cost of government and reduces the tax burden as many of these articles suggest.
Naive question, but wouldn't using a hyperbolic arc instead of a parabolic arc completely solve the issue?
Taxes don't have to be annual.
> The end game is that Uber, Lyft and taxi drivers are out of a job as chauffeur.

This is true, but as someone who grew up somewhere where there's snow on the ground 6 months out of the year, I'm wondering how we're going to deal with more extreme driving conditions. How reliable are these self-driving cars in ice and snow? Is there even a strong economic reason to solve this problem right now?

My concern is that we'll end up with a fleet of cars that work great 90% of the time, and then flat refuse to drive when they fall outside their design envelope. At that point driving will be a niche market: the pool of drivers for emergency vehicles (which can't just take the day off when it's snowing), and services in rural areas (where detailed maps and standard heuristics may fail) will be the only permanent workforce. Meanwhile anyone else with a licence will have to step in as a chauffeur when conditions get bad.
Yes, in another thread someone mentionned a trojan that hit five randomly-generated hostnames and, if they all resolve to the same IP, assumes its running in a sandbox.
Ah yes, the old: "This action harms no one but yourself, but we wish to protect you from yourself, so the solution is to turn you into a criminal when you perform said action. For your own good of course."
theDoug, how long do you typically get internally to move off of major services to new revisions at Google? Are there services that have been deprecated for more than a year, or even been resurrected? If so then 1 year really isn't reasonable to someone who built on a service. At big co I worked at, I would routinely see 3-5 year deprecation plans with a possibility of paid support after. A bank I was consulting for was using Java 1.3 in 2010 and paying oracle millions to keep it patched as they wanted to have a standard java across the company and a key system was very afraid of upgrading (I think they were really stupid but it's their money).
Once the BTC goes through an exchange, and withdrawn in another cryptocurrency, it would be almost impossible to trace without cooperation of the exchange. I'm sure there are plenty of exchanges out there that wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement.
Ways the WannaCry ransomware could have been much worse
Good point. Definitely not as directly as Google, but in this case I guess I could make a fair point that their reporting and campaign management APIs for accessing campaigns we as a client pay 6-7 digit amounts per month for could be counted as such.
(2005) Suffix Arrays – A Programming Contest Approach [pdf]
Giving this a try! Thanks for the tip.
I don't believe you're characterizing his thermodynamic explanation accurately - he's simply pointing out that the distance from the source of thermal radiation matters. Since radiant energy follows the inverse square law, this makes perfect sense.
Let's tell that to companies that take value created by workers and give it to managers. "Michael Cembalest, J.P. Morgan’s chief investment officer, has calculated that reductions in wages and benefits were responsible for about 75 percent of the increase in corporate profits between 2000 and 2007." http://prospect.org/article/if-labor-dies-whats-next
> This would be in place of all other entitlements, including unemployment benefits, and would most likely eliminate pensions as well.

This is why I dislike basic income

It has become the term for a state run program and people have to tried to sell it by reassuring skeptics that it will replace the systems in place

I disagree on all accounts

Capitalism without the need to acquire capital should be offered by banks and all other state run aide programs left as they are
I have tried this book a few times, and I'm awed by it, yet I am not significantly better. I fear the problem is that when Sanjay refers to educated guessing, the level of education and practice is very high indeed. While I can marvel at the examples in the book, I would need a steady stream of work-a-day examples to work through, ala Project Euler.
Wow thanks!
Close Encounters with Symbolic Execution
Not real? See just like magic leaps products! ;)
You have to look at this valuation (and things like Facebook's Oculus investment, etc.) as these big companies trying to figure out what is going to come after smartphones.

Whatever does is going to print money and own an ecosystem for a couple of decades. What is that worth?

Today:

Apple's about to cross the $1 trillion cumulative revenue milestone iOS.

Android's generated revenue of $31 Billion [2]

In a world where Apple is suing Qualcomm for $1B over fundamental networking chips. Even if MagicLeap does nothing but license their patents to all the other tech players, could they still be worth $8B dollars?

1 - https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/11/apple-1-trillion-in-revenue-f...

2 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
My favorite one of these in the John Hancock Tower in Boston which had to have its entire facade replaced and was known as the Plywood Palace while the work was underway: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/07/29/plywoo....

Even to this day the winds around the base of the JHT can be obscenely high. I used to walk past it often from Back Bay station to my apartment down Stuart St. and the block it occupies when it lightly rains or snows it feels like a Hurricane vs the blocks immediately before and after it.
My theory is because Craigslist deeply rooted network effects in the low end of the market.

Competing in the low end means that its a volume based game because each unit of value (each craigslist posting) is low. A new company trying to gain momentum capturing a small user base does't work because in this smaller stage of the company you have no network effects.

If you try to steal those low end customers with a 10x product, you will spend a ton of money to capture users that aren't very valuable.

If you make something that adds 10x more value, with people who want 10x in value, then by design you work yourself out of Craigslist's turf like AirBnB (they started hacky low end but now are moving into higher end listings to drive growth).

in short, I believe there is a valley of death when you try "siege tactics" on Craigslist's network effects.
> How come has it not been improved in years?

Because it works. It's simply, "good enough.
Not really, although I do avoid doing anything intensive KB wise. My stocktake is just inputting numbers, and then return, over and over. To format the document, I do that on my PC.

Typing on the pad is a major pain in the arse honestly, partially because it is an older unit, and every update requirea more processing power to do the basics.
tl;dr summary, with quotes:

1. moral hazard: "Basic income is a seductive poison."

2. redistribution is unpopular: "The middle class, who would finance the basic income but who would not benefit from it materially, are unlikely to find social justice or solidarity in this 'unconditional' redistribution."

3. moral hazard + immigrant peril: "Migrant workers and other immigrants need more mechanisms to help with social integration, not fewer."

In other words, the scolding moralist argument. Which, I must admit, is really quite a throwback in this era of "say anything to get rich" conservatism. I also think UBI will never accomplish what many of its proponents promise, but for rather different reasons:

1. Rent will eat it all. Every penny and more will be absorbed by housing costs - it will end up as an enormous wealth transfer to landowners and lenders. For the big money backing UBI, this is the dream.

2. You can't actually replace all other social programs with it, because some people will not spend it on health insurance or rent or food for their kids, and the results won't be politically acceptable.

3. Did I mention rent?
From the forward, "With rare exceptions, the mathematics that I have found most useful was learned in science and engineering classes [or] on my own".

This has been the case for me too. I never learned this in a class in school, but one of the most important things I've always done when learning some mathematic topic is try to #1 associate it with something in the real world and #2 find a way to "guestimate" without a calculator what the answers will be. For instance, take square roots. The sqrt of 137 will be between 11 and 12 more precisely about 11.7 and I can visualize it in my head as one side of a 2D square shape. Also squares and square roots allow me to easily think about the area covered (size/shape) by N-dimensions in relation to the size of just one dimension. A real world application which is interesting to note is that the time it takes a falling object to hit the ground is equal to the square root of the distance traveled (really 2 times the square root divided by gravity but the general relationship is the same).
A few years ago I was a C evangelist. C++ was and more so now is a fine language with a lot of features I want. But Rust has that simplicity in a systems language that I crave that lets me do my own thing. That elegence.
It's my favourite language by far. Keep it up!
Has anyone tried developing anything for Hololens? Want to know how was the experience and how do you see the application ecosystem moving there
Yeah, it's of moderate concern. I can see why it's not really a priority here, since they're probably targeting languages that already don't have GC to compile into WASM, like c++ as a canonical example. I have to imagine that GC is also a pretty huge section of performance / JIT compilation problems in the javascript runtime. So shipping a spec that doesn't support it is no worse than allowing statically compiled code to run on desktop computers.

That said, I wonder how the WASM runtime is sandboxed. Not having a runtime-provided memory manager makes me worry not just about memory leaks, but also about explicit shenanigans in different memory zones. It's hard to believe that a WASM runtime doesn't protect against this sort of escaping though, so it's more of an academic wondering than a real concern.
>> The Telegraph talks a little bit about how he’s self-taught, and how he stopped WannaCry by figuring out it had a kill-switch.

The reasearcher's blog (posted on HN earlier) said that although originally he thought it was a kill switch he now thinks it was just a clumsy attempt at detecting whether the worm was runnign inside a sandbox.

Apparently, worms will often do that sort of thing- call out to an unregistered domain to check whether they get a response indicating that they're not really connected to the internet. Except the ones that do it right call out to some random domains and this one had it hard-coded (either because the creator of the worm was a numpty or because they forgot it) (and therefore, a numpty).

So it probably wasn't a kill-switch in the sense of a failsafe, as it was reported in the press.
Have any of them told you how the pay is higher at Lyft? They both take 25%.

Edit: tips?
Benedict Evans has tweeted glowingly a few times about Magic Leap, following product demos. I sceptical but I trust his opinion, regardless of the fact that he works for a16z
I think SQL is too verbose for use on the terminal. find + grep does the trick with way less verbose syntax (but also probably less readable). With that said, it is quite cool.
A piece of software that is operating on an non-supported OS is not a functioning piece of software.

Why not, exactly? What is mysteriously going to stop working just because someone's legal arrangement expired?

Or to be blunt, how many people do you think we should kill by not using medical technology bought at great cost just because some lawyers would like a bit more money please?

Usually, when software in the corporate environment is purchased, it is with a maintenance agreement or it should be. Part of the maintenance agreement should be for future versions of the OS from the same software vendor (eg, Microsoft in this case).

That's a lovely theory, but in the real world organisations buy very useful, very expensive equipment all the time with the expectation that its useful lifetime will be longer than any currently available OS is officially supported for. Moreover, in many cases it might not be economic to purchase at all without that. This is why standards and compatibility are so important.

Perhaps in the future with more and more apps going from Desktop to SAAS or mobile this might be less of a problem.

Heaven help us if anything important ever moves to SAAS, because no-one else will. SAAS is sometimes useful for convenience or short term flexibility. Self-hosted is for professionals who need guarantees.
I wonder if this may be because of the weather, but why can't you grow vines on the metal trees to make it "green"? Or some sort of wall hugging vegetation. I mean, sure its not the same as a tree, but at least it might look nicer.
Someone actually built a model back in 2013 to predict risks of various Google APIs shutting down:

https://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
I found gelato too complex when dealing with 2-5 methods only but I understand that the tools are build for larger teams. It's great to get hosted documentation up and running fast and code snippets for various languages to get started.

Have a look at https://apiblueprint.org/tools.html which covers mocking APIs, converting to https://www.getpostman.com/, validation inside IDEs and generating HTML for self-hosting.

http://documentation.js.org/ is relatively new and seems to target nodejs primarily.
That looks like a false dichotomy to me. I don't see any reason why the NSA's role couldn't include protecting the nation's citizens. I mean that's the original purpose of government, no?
True, you didn't say it's not worth doing, but you called it "100% political pandering," which certainly makes it sound like you don't like the refugee program. I agree immigration isn't going to "change the world". And I understand the argument that general immigration programs could potentially cause brain drain for these countries, but not the refugee program. Refugee visas are given based on need, it doesn't prioritize the smartest and the most successful like other visa programs, so it can't cause that brain drain effect.

Also, I am skeptical of the argument that refugee programs incentivize people to stay in refugee camps in hopes of being relocated as NumbersUSA claims. Refugee camps are pretty terrible places, few people would stay in one if they didn't have to. And the odds of being selected for resettlement are extremely rare.
Many thoughts on this. But they all come down to: it sounds like you think Amazon's current moat is trivial for Wal-Mart to overcome. Should be a few more months now and then Wal-Mart will start to take the ecommerce lead, then ;)
Craigslist is ubiquitous in its niche, but i never really engaged with it beyond having a laugh at the occasional Craigslist meme post that worked it's way into the internet at large.

At the same time, for years now I've been banging on to any of my industry friends about how global social networks are an internet anachronism and that local networks are the future.

It's only just dawned on me that my misplaced futurism was simply describing a very successful long term business. A billion dollars later, it turns out Craigslist isn't niche at all - my thinking was.
Because of this, I usually frame it with a salary-and-benefits-adjusted alternative.

E.g. "I'm very interested in the position we discussed, but would like to discuss clauses X, Y, and Z. These pose a problem for me for reasons. If this is something you could be flexible on, I'd love to see what we can agree on! If these aren't clauses that can be changed, I feel that salary +A and benefits +B would be more in line with what you're asking for."

If phrased like that, you're putting the "choice" back in their hands, but making it clear just how much these things are worth to you.

They may say "Neither of those options works for us," but the difference is that they're making the decision to torpedo your hiring over one of their own clauses. Imo, it's much more difficult to say "These clauses are worth A & B" than it is to say "These clauses are super important."
Mars Plans from NASA, Russia, China Include a Lunar Base
Update: The VM has been updated!
Levandowski is going to come out of this OK. He was doing self-driving years before Google.

As I've pointed out before, the whole LIDAR thing is a side issue. Google's LIDAR is another Velodyne-like spinning thing. Google's patented innovation is to make each scan beam slightly oval, which is marginally useful but not essential. Spinning 3D LIDAR units are research and prototyping tools. The future is either flash LIDAR or MEMS. Even Velodyne is moving beyond the spinning top thing.[1]

Here's a video with some images from Continental's flash LIDAR.[2] That's suitable for production cars. Continental is a big German auto parts company. They make other LIDAR products, vehicle cameras and processors, radars, GPS units, and most of the other parts needed for self-driving. Continental demoed a self-driving car in 2013. They have 1,300 people working on this. Uber makes a lot of noise, but Continental is going to ship product in volume.

Quanergy, a Silicon Valley startup, announced a flash LIDAR last year, but they seem to be having problems getting it out the door. A new startup, TetraView, got series A funding to develop a higher resolution flash LIDAR ("2K", they boast), using standard CMOS technology.[3] That, if it works, will bring the price down further while increasing the resolution, and will have other robotics applications.

So nobody really needs the Waymo LIDAR technology. For testing, you can buy a Velodyne, and for production, the flash LIDAR people are almost ready.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/velodyne-lidar-enters-the...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxy08YX0C8w
[3] http://www.tetravue.com/technology/
Would they make more money if they demanded $10 instead of $300? While $300 isn't crazy money, it's more than enough to be painful, and definitely feels like ransom.

I wonder how many people facing a locked computer would sigh, say a few choice swearwords, and dig out their cards had it been a relatively low amount.
Another approach to attack the holy grail of self cleaning surfaces: Damaged surface segments on self cleaning materials form a point of 'dirt crystalization'. From these points, dirt starts to cover the surface.

This problem is addressed by Rühe's* paper [1] with a creative "shedding concept". Upon damage, water can access the water soluble glue material upon which the water repelling elements are sitting. The damaged hydrophobic element rinsed away, exposing a fresh hydrophobic element. Unfortunately, the regenerative potential is limited to the number of sacrificial hydrophobic elements.

[1] 10.1021/acs.langmuir.7b00814

* Disclaimer: I met Jürgen in a joint group meetings during the Macromolecular Kolloquium in Freiburg. Great to see his name again via HN.. this was such a long time ago!
For those of us on Windows: Everything [1] does the job quite nicely with much less verbose syntax.

[1] http://voidtools.com
Uber Engineer Barred From Work on Key Self-Driving Technology, Judge Says
Anyone know a use for an iPad 1?

I have one that works perfectly, but YouTube doesn't work anymore and I'd love to install Linux or something on it but I couldn't find anything out there.
I think we agree that Google does a better job at shutting down APIs (paid or unpaid) than Facebook does. But I don't think people are bothered about the way Google shuts down services, but rather that they shut them down at all.
I think its okay what they are doing. They are competing with Microsoft, Apple, etc... Raise big and play to win I think is a valid strategy, even if it means keeping things secret.
Oh, so they jumped the gun with this post? Got it.
This is a good idea and it's on my very long nice-to-have list. How are you driving the browser? Some sort of UI testing library? My bank has no API so it'd have to screen scrape.

EDIT: Sorry, I can see that it says it right there in your post: Selenium. Leaving up my stupid question as a marker of shame.
What if Walmart offered same-day-delivery using their existing physical shops as logistics centers? Actually, the fact that Walmart do NOT sell third-party items in their website can make they service better (less crowded, more focused, more quality).

OT: why Walmart don't expand to Europe and other regions?
And the amazing thing about it is it includes a lot of the basic foodstuff staples that amazon doesn't carry, or adds a hidden $4 shipping charge to. Compare the price for a low-end shaving cream at Walmart and Amazon. Walmart: $1.75. Amazon only has them at $5 each, or in a 6-pack for $13.
Couldn't you hypothetically design the pinout to be suitably symmetrical to avoid major part of the wasted pins. For example if the chip has 4 memory channels, then lay out the memory pins identically but rotated in each quadrant. Same principle should apply to other major pin count consumers (pcie lanes, power/ground pins), which leaves somewhat small area that needs to be duplicated/quadrupled.

Of course implementing such design would be ridiculously complicated with very little benefit. But it would be pretty cool though :)