skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty sure the code doesn't say

if gender == 'f':
price *= 1.3

But it is concievable that an algorithm found a cluster of people who are willing to pay more at a certain time, for certain routes. After all, that is what their rate finding algorithm does. That's what I'd make it do to maximize profit.

It just happens to be that the result is that some women (on average, or in some select cases, I don't know) are asked to pay a lot more at night. If it is based explicitly on gender, that would be really dumb, and I don't think even Uber is that evil. But if it is based on a close correlate, the effect is entirely similar.

We as a society need to think about if we want that, or if we want to add the constraint to such algorithms that men and women pay the same.

Is it OK that...

... people pay more at rush hour than at other times?

... people pay more in unpleasant weather?

... women pay more than men?

... people of different race pay differently?

... people of different income pay differently?

... potentially sick people pay more on the way to the doctor?

These are all things we have to consider. What do we leave to the market and algorithms to decide, and what do we constrain? Some cases are IMO absolutely clear cut, some we'll have to debate.
Its a non-moored mooring buoy... if anything can survive, that design will.
This seems like the likely answer. Of course an unchecked algorithm would come to this conclusion, the key being that the algorithm is acting "without supervision". But it seems like negligence to not be supervising these algorithms.
The great thing is email is easily extensible. Think of all the things that can be done on email!
Agree with this, addition of an optional To Do field added to email UX would make it simple/obvious to use.
Those jets must be flown by two pilots. This one is designed for a single owner-pilot. That's a huge difference.
The Evil Within the Comparison Functions (C,C++,C#)
I am routinely amazed that people find Slack innovative. It's basically a pretty front-end to IRC. And your chat logs were always searchable.. open in a text editor and Ctrl-F. Even the integrations aren't novel, IRC bots have existed for decades.

IRC also has the added benefit of being scalable and free. And everyone has their favorite client already that is more customizable than any Slack client. And you can own your own data/conversations, as an organization. I have never really been comfortable with the notion that Slack can poke around in any channel's history regardless of how secret those conversations are thought to be.
> Unfortunately, I inherited some Symfony applications recently. Unfortunately, because the whole stack is terribly slow and held together by an insane amount of YAML and XML configuration files. Add "annotations" (that are parsed out of doc blocks and compiled into another bunch of PHP files) to the soup and party like it's 1998.

That sounds like a wrong configuration and/or architecture. Symfony is in my experience fast if you follow the best practices.

Maybe you should find out the bottlenecks before you blame Symfony.

> just DON'T do long running processes with PHP.

We run long-running workers just fine.

> You want to enable a module? Good luck finding the right php.ini.

That depends on your OS. In Debian/Ubuntu you just run phpenmod module and restart the service.

I don't know... Your criticism seems to stem from not looking at the issues closely, or maybe you were stuck in a really old, abandoned system. But that woukd have been ugly regardless of language.
Hard to imagine paying $2 million for a plane and shitting in a bucket behind a curtain.
header tags could also indicate if something was to be interpreted as a certain type, no? "quick message/alert" vs "long form message" vs "automated message" vs "from human", etc. Agents could then determine what to do with it - log it, send other notification, delete it, auto-reply, add to calendar, etc.

I'm no expert, but I'd think some of this is already being done, no? However, there's more value to a few companies to have walled-garden messaging platforms vs 100% open and interoperable, and that's not a problem solved by tags.
I found the juxtaposition of these two statements odd:

>"Twitter is a hive of trolling and abuse that it seems unable to stop."

>"Then came Twitter, which wasn’t his idea but was his company. He remains the largest individual shareholder and a board member."

Why is it - "it seems unable to stop" and not "we seem unable to stop"? Does he really have no influence or power as an outsized share holder, board member and founder of Twitter? He can't help fix that "broken" bit?
This is about Windows 10 S, though. Windows today is an okay system to hack on - and I say that as a Linux user who prefers to have even more control over my computer than Windows allows.

Windows today at least lets you compile a program and run it - Windows 10 S will block you from running a program you wrote yourself because it's not "trusted".
This should have been a link to the Bloomberg article rather than an anecdotal tweet.

I wonder if it's possible to hack Uber's individual demand model by occasionally opening the app, picking a typical destination, and then closing as if it's too expensive.
Google already aims to provide better medical results. They recently hired former FDA head Rob Califf to help lead that effort.

I'm also fairly convinced big tech companies will eat up any emerging market that's within it's competency unless there's some core violation of principles. Take Duck Duck Go, for example. They've definitely managed to steal market share away from Google because they clash with Google's lack of concern for pure privacy. Snapchat managed to do the same to Facebook because of their disappearing images, but now that Facebook has incorporated those features into Instagram, that point of difference is dead.

For as long as big tech maintains the startup mindset, challengers will invevitably be swallowed either through competition or acquisition. In my opinion, the most ambitious startups are those pursuing underserved markets encumbered by bureaucratic or corporate incompetency.
There will soon by a trial where we'll get to find out.

The biggest problem with their defense is that they have for so long been so loud and obnoxious about flaunting laws. It's easy to believe Google's claims.
Author here. I actually started this project after buying Divvy. Divvy has many more features but I could never set it up just right. In particular I found no way to use the grid feature without the mouse (other than assigning shortcuts to pre-defined layouts). So I scratched my own itch and created Keypad Layout as a simple no-frills replacement that works exactly the way I want it to.
Actually I somewhat disagree with that. I think they should code to some extent, but it doesn't scale in my experience. I lean to say #7 is a good point.

If the manager is required to complete the feature their "free" time is't the same as an engineer - read meetings/discussions. I manage two teams and when I first became a manager my instinct was to take tickets along with the team. Yet my other responsibilities came in play and made it harder for me to finish tickets I assigned to myself and others on the team waited.

I still code review and partake in high level design and some scripts here or there etc. but not mainline code that another engineer will depend on to be completed by xyz date.

The goal of a manager is to ensure the work pipeline and project trajectory are on path with the company needs while still taking time to learn new tech and skill-sets of the team. Of course most importantly protecting their time from distractions.

To move from manager upwards, building a great team that trusts each other and follows and ensures the team standards is crucial. If I am required for every decision or code review, then I become the bottleneck. Empowering other people and trusting their judgement was one of the harder leanings growing from manager upward.
Deposit accounts just cover a fraction of the financial services we regularly use in the developed world. They still lack retirement schemes, insurance and investment funds, etc. Blockchains (due to working in a trustless environment) could make these services possible in countries lacking the required settlement infrastructure and legal frameworks. The services provided by their telcos are also usually limited to a deposit account in the local currency. They don't provide access to international financial markets, ie. they can't invest in a retirement fund in London or buy Euros. And just like the internet allowed hackers to access information that their government censored, blockchains give people access to financial assets which their government could previously restrict.
I do agree that we throw people in jail too often, but if we're going to let corporations straight up lie for a low price, what we're charging is a usage fee, not a penalty.
I'd also point out that swaths of people probably already have left Uber and tons of other companies for unethical practices.

You just don't notice because they get replaced, and the new people assume that existing practices are the norm. The world keeps spinning.

I guess my point is, if you don't see many people leaving at once, that isn't evidence there isn't something fishy going on. People have families, mortgages, children's tuition payments...
Why stop when you can leak in the sky.
This sounds awesome

> Undaunted is a terrible boat, but he is a great storm shelter. A sailing capsule ready for the worst and also able to do the easy part, sailing in a straight line.

So basically it's about surviving indefinitely while drifting in the right direction. Why does anyone do this voluntarily.

> Kent says he is unconcerned about the psychological challenge of living in such a small space for four months.

> “I have spent weeks alone in the Guatemalan Highlands, and lived alone in the woods for years. I have never been so alone or for so long, but few have.

Ah.
> Mr. Williams — a Twitter founder, a co-creator of Blogger — set everyone free, providing tools to address the world. In the history of communications technology, it was a development with echoes of Gutenberg.

Uh, hmm, no. That's a bit too much of a stretch.

It's hard to take an article seriously after a claim like that.
In this Jepsen analysis, we’ll discuss multiple serializability violations in CockroachDB beta-20160829 through beta-20160908

https://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829
I'm wondering if Divvy is going to be hit by this patent holder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14333957

This project seems safe, as the UI doesn't show a preview grid you can drag over.
this does not sound like wolframalpha at all.

wolframalpha is computer algebra software turned into a web service which allows for searching some papers, pre-written articles and a bunch of interesting, curated numbers.

wolframalpha provides qualitative answers to "questions about math".

answering the physics problem "whats the speed of light" with "er its fast" is qualitative. saying its 2.99+/- epsilon 10^6 km/s is a quantitative result based on data gathered from some experiment.

answering the search engine problem "whats the speed of light" with "2.99+/- epsilon 10^6 km/s" is not a quantitative result. in a search engine contexts, thats just the most likely correct result . qualitative. just a guess. some computer looked at a bunch of data and decided that one of them was probably right based on some popularity heuristic. its like asking an expert who makes an educated guess and claims its right because seniority.

a quantitative search engine would be capable of answering questions like "how many sites do X".

wolframalpha doesnt do that. its just maple in a browser.
> Europeans have Africa beat.

War seems to have stopped in (Western) Europe though. That is until the Russians take advantage of the current power vacuum to start one, or a spark ignites between ethnic groups that haven't been around in large enough numbers until very recently.

On the other hand, Africa is at war today. See: article being discussed and [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Africa#21...
Not sure if you've done launched a product before but I'll describe my experience at my last company.

We built amazing technology that crawled Yelp, Google, foursquare, Facebook, citysearch, superpages, etc. and we displayed listing info, likes, checkins, ratings, and reviews all in one place. Even better, we let businesses update their info in our dashboard and we pushed it out to the sites. We let them reply to and flag reviews in our dashboard and we posted them on the sites. We spent from 2010 to 2013 building all this tech, and all the devs kept pushing the founders to get it in the hands of customers but they kept insisting that we have a "finished" product first.

So in 2013 when we had all the features in place we launched our beta and while people signed up, in app usage patterns showed they didn't do much. It turns out that small businesses don't really care about anything outside yelp or Facebook (TripAdvisor for some) and they can do that manually. If only we had asked them first...

The next 2 years were spent retooling the app to serve franchise and multilocation customers (the most active customers turned out to be part of bigger chains so we went after these). If the founders had gone out to talk to customers before we started writing code, we could have learned this first.
I wonder how much of that is true. The big difference for me between Google's results for buying things and Amazon's is how trustworthy they are.

Google's results are not trustworthy at all. Will there be a buy option at all behind a Google search result ? Good guess. Shipping available/reasonable ? Odds are not good. Not a scam ? ... not sure how to judge that one at all ... and of course there's no shortage of scams on the internet, some of which rank pretty well on Google.

Amazon is not optimal though. They're not reliable enough for my parents for instance. I guess the issue is that compared to a local store they still suck.

Still compared to Google and webshops, they're definitely the superior product.
How old are you? I was never taught anything useful like that in secondary school. I'm 32.
http://www.airships.net is a great resource to learn about the airships, both the technical aspects and the life on board. It seems every article's comments is a discussion about whether and that we should ot could start building Zeppelins again. Makes one wish to be in a position like Elon Musk.
Survival bias. Look it up.

Also worth looking up: wishful thinking.
That's awesome news!
I don't know it feels like tech industry really rewards being an asshole and bro culture at workspace. Probably the investors are inspired too much by Wolf of Wall Street.
How does this compare:
http://www.velocityaircraft.com/airplane-models-vtwin.html
I actually wish you all the best if you plan to build one. Having said that, you are identifying a niche product which can only survive by charging people money for searching, which more or less caps how ambitious such an idea could be.
To my mind, these are the most important, unsolved problems:

- environmental degradation is based on two exponential growth trends: human population and per-capita consumption (driven by economic growth). Solving either could be, literally, a save the world scenario. The first is easiest technically, (healthcare, non-coercive birth control, education, economic opportunity for women) but a political minefield. (yes, population is still growing exponentially)

- dealing with climate change. At a minimum, this means figuring out how to handle a significant rise in sea level in the next 100 years. Walls? Relocation? We need to think about response now, more so than avoidance.

- actually doing geo-engineering to prevent/reverse the greenhouse effect

- preventing a nuclear war

- preventing a large asteroid collision

- dealing with large-scale disruption of employment (for example retail continues to be hammered by online stores, self-driving trucks, etc.) Build a better Mechanical Turk might be a useful strategy.

Obviously some of these are low-probability short-term events, but they have very high costs. In a sense, you would be taking advantage of people's tendency to systematically under-invest in problems of that kind.
I suppose the difference is this government won't actually want to pay for the great firewall!
For the people that keep saying this result is because older doctors get allocated sicker patients - this is definitely not the case. When you are rostered on, you see every patient that comes in the door no matter how simple or complex.
If you think a corporate-controlled email address will provide you with a paper trail when it counts, you're delusional. It will, however, work against you whenever it's convenient for your employer.

That's one reason for every lawyer's advice on corporate emails: anything older than at most 2 months must get automatically deleted, even when there is no interaction from you, preferably without exceptions. Things that require longer term storage should simply be printed out and stored offsite. Anything you find offensive, anything about your employment conditions, ... should likewise be printed out and go to offsite storage.

This is not destruction of evidence because you're doing this as a standard policy "to save space and to declutter" (hah !), not as a reaction to being sued. As to why that argument convinces anyone when large companies can reasonably be expected to get sued very regularly ... But it is pretty well established in legal precedent.

You can download the emails of course, but then the accusation that, firstly, this is against your contract (it probably is forbidden in your contract), and secondly the emails could be faked will definitely be there. And of course, policies are likely in place to prevent you from doing this, even if they're very unlikely to be effective.
I like WA, but most of the quantitative info is what I'd call "highschool stuff." It is improving all the time, and some of it's math capabilities can reach into advanced undergraduate territory, though.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=IR+spectrum+of+toluene

http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C108883&Units=SI&Ty...
…said someone somewhere pretty much every second since 3000 years.
Ironically I'm now more interested to read it after hearing your alternative title.
I'm still not sure why Microsoft hasn't just bought out Unity. Unity is almost like DirectX was for the 1990s for the 2010s.
Maybe the post needs some clarity so I might not fully understand, but I believe you're confusing the "I have an idea that seems obvious" step vs executing the "Let's start a company" step.
>I've seen this reasoning used to keep developers out of requirements gathering, for example.

That can be fair reasoning if you already have difficult work to do and your customers are noisy, disorganized, or inexperienced with developing requirements (think NYC window-shopping for features on someone else's credit card).
Clearly survival bias, but I think the point stands: None of these necessarily started out as "Let's be crazy ambitious" but all had the kind of impact that Graham is looking for.
These are not frighteningly ambitious. How about:

— A platform for CRISPR-assisted human genome editing. I, for one, welcome improving our inefficient, disease-ridden, short-lived bodies.

— A morality API. Various human societies have different moral concerns and taboos. Can we expose some tweaks and tools to navigate this as continuous spectra?

— Post-government transitional structures. Hierarchical power arrangements and traditional governments are doomed anyway; let's use network science to simulate and explore how things might work in the future.

And I still want my thermonuclear power generation. If electricity is to finally totally replace combustion, we need it cheaper. MUCH cheaper.
Quotes (and subsequent commentary) on HN comments are a great way for me to decide what to read or not. Yours is a great example of that, thanks for that. I wont read it.
The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990

Yes, the Internet was delivering daily value in 1990, but only to a very, very small group of users. I was in grad school then, but the Internet was not a factor in my environment. Networking was carrying floppies from here to there.

Same thing with cryptocurrencies. It's delivering value to a small group of users, though that group is much more than the small group served by the Internet in 1990. Mining and trading in cryptocurrencies have millions for some, so it's serving them well.
That seems to be the option for $3M jets as well. You have to get up to $4M to get a door in front of your toilet.

Here's the $3M toilet option (Cessna Citation Mustang): https://blog.privatefly.com/us/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/mu...
So mono is using .NET core, internally?
Came here to recommend spectacle too. I basically only use the keyboard shortcuts to send windows to the left half, or right half of the screen. If you hit them again it does 2/3rds or 1/3rds of that side of the screen which is helpful on lower resolutions. That pretty much covers me for window management.
Instead of spewing a incredibly short-sighted rhetoric that suggests people kill each other if they have a tribe, perhaps you should stop and think.

Let me pose it this way.

You were born a Native American, your tribe is your family, and your history. For all intents, yhey are a nation that raised you.

Around you are strangers. They come from a different nation.

They butchered your ancestors to steal what they had.

Yet, as is the way of your tribe, you try to be peaceful and considerate.

In response, some are kind to you. But, their leaders steal your water.

Not just sustinence, something special to the stories of your people.

You protest peacefully.

They react with violence.

How do you feel?

Tribes aren't something to give up. They're a part of you. Your history. Do you tell an Irishman to forget his kilt? An Englishman his Coat of Arms? Do you tell someone who's grandfather was a slave that its okay to be poor, because he's equal now?

The tribe is family, history, and nation. When your neighbour tried to sell your grandfather out for diamonds, there will be problems.

If anything, Africa shows us problems we ignore... And that with time and effort, relations can be improved. Sometimes it doesn't work. Bill kills Joe, because Joe bragged that his Da used to eat your family.

But forgetting who you are, isn't going to help.
The only thing that really bothers me personally about shorteners is not knowing where I'm going to end up, and not being able to identify articles I've read before. A shortener with a dedicated domain and user-chosen ids should cover that just fine. The only outstanding issue in the article is a single extra DNS lookup, which is pretty minor compared to the massive chains which were causing the problem.
I've always suspected it should be possible to charge people in non-monetary ways. That is to say: charge them by having them give you computer resources.
Good video on this "Why you shouldn't trust successful people's advice"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k7jeQQdqPA
Google’s latest platform play is AI, and it’s already winning
from a pure business model sense it is true programmer focused search is not good space to be in ..

Solving problems you face daily and are tired of has always been significant driver of innovation. This is an important and satisfying problem to be working on, not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn.
It would be better if the states didn't treat education like indentured servitude. Society as a whole benefits immensely from an educated populous, and our tax dollars should in turn recognize this. Instead we have a population that's​ indebted to corporations precisely because there's no other means to pay of their student debt. Why take the risk of a startup or independent venture when you have 100k in debt to pay for an education that makes you a productive member of society.