skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cartels and monopolies easily evade competition. And evasion of anti-trust is now just another business expense.
The flip side is that they can also predict what's the minimum pay an individual driver is willing to take.

The airline industry has been doing personalized pricing for years - if you don't believe me, redo a flight search in incognito mode. It's interesting how Uber's other transgressions have place a magnifying class over all their other activity.
A big thing in this thread is "fully remote."

The fact is WFH does not need to be a full time thing for most companies. Just offer it as a benefit-if you want, you can work from home 2 days a week, or WFH if you need to be home to pick up a package or have a doctors appointment.

That alone will make your company much more attractive.
Well, this is a subset of the things the military has given us. It has also given us duct tape, for example. And NASA gave us velcro.

The common theme here, it seems to me, is that when people are working in hostile environments for high stakes, problems which are normally easy, such as preparing and storing food, fixing leaks, or keeping things put, can become insurmountable barriers which warrant a great deal of ingenuity and investment. The solutions found in those contexts can apply to the rest of us and make the problem easier.

So I would expect, for example, long range spaceflight to yield medical advances in self-diagnosis and treatment.
How important documentation is. Having to go back to code I wrote years ago, figure out what I was trying to do, relearn specific add-ons/libraries that were only used for that project, then figure out all that has changed/abandoned in the intervening time, avoiding the temptation to start by refactoring... Very difficult, and very easy to be doing unprofitable work because my state of programming mind is so much different each time than the project that is now years older.
Making a robotics video series using open-source software and children's toys
Nothing interesting ever comes from comments like these. Please don't.
Yes. But this is about as stupid an attitude as believing capitalism is a pure God-sent miracle and everything it does is only wonderful. The market economy brought us the age of unparalleled prosperity worldwide, but it also has serious problems worth addressing. One can talk about the drawbacks while at the same time being grateful for the positives.

(Personally, I believe market economy has been much more beneficial to society in the past than it is now - simply because it's running out of "low hanging fruits", and the disconnect between its implicit values and what humans would generally like to see is growing.)
Yeah, the evolution of Windows and OSX towards integrated "App Stores" and less control over app installation bums me out too. I grew up with a C64 and BASIC at the READY prompt, and hope the world of personal computing allowing anybody to write and run software survives well into the future.
The entrance to the arctic “doomsday” seed vault just flooded
No, that means some business wasn't competitive.

When machines were created, many clothing companies folded because cotton become more expensive. It was expensive because machines could make clothes cheaper, so people brought more. Is that a shortage?

At any time there's trash on some street that could be picked-up by hand. That's a job in direct competition with yours, yet there's nobody there hand-cleaning the streets. Is that a shortage?
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (Taleb)
As a security analyst/engineer, PowerShell is both one of my favorite (for collecting information, forensics, administrating and protecting, etc.) and least favorite (because practically every day we're fending off malware using different PowerShell techniques we have to detect and mitigate, plus it's a favorite of APTs) tools.
AvE tears down the Juicero [video]
I did not dig very deep, but I completed a tutorial in all of these. Cobol was not a pleasant experience, I did the Hello World and moved on.

Fortran did not click for me, but I gave it a fair (I think) try, and compared to its abysmal reputation, it was actually fairly nice. At least for the couple of toy programs I wrote in it. Fortran 90 or 95 was a significant improvement on previous versions, as far as I could figure out. But I had no use for it either, so I moved on.

I had to learn Java during my training, around the time I had finally understood the basics of functional programming and Lisp, so I hated Java with fierce passion. ;-)

Sometime after that I took another look at Java and now it wasn't as bad - Generics had been introduced to Java, and I finally had a computer powerful enough to run something like NetBeans or Eclipse. But you know what they say about first impressions. ;-) I don't hate Java, but I am not drawn to it, either.

Sometimes, the experience is very ambiguous, for example with C++. Some people love C++, and I think I can see why they love it. Some people hate C++ passionately, and I can see why they hate it, too. It's weird. (But then, so is C++)
Given that Google is progressively building higher and higher walls around Android, thinking a Google project is going to save you from walled gardens is perhaps a bit silly. Right now it's not marketable, but once it is, expect the business people at Google to start pushing Play Services and the like onto this platform too.

That being said, there's a lot of things about Fuchsia that are pretty interesting, and I'm definitely curious what ends up being done with it.
Let me try to demystify what we're talking about, and show competition works fine even in this scenario.

Let's say a ride is worth $20 for the consumer and $12 for the producer, for a total surplus of $8. If the price they agree on is $14, the consumer surplus is $6 and the producer surplus is $2.

If the producer can be sure the consumer values the ride at $20, they can charge $19 and take home most of the surplus.

Now lets introduce a competing producer, which is equally competent and can also figure out all this.

By your "what Producer wants to leave money on the table?" theory, they would also charge $19, and maybe get half the market that way.

But obviously they could also charge $18, get all of the market, and make a lot more money. Producer 1 will obviously retaliate and prices will go down.
Interesting, I hadn't heard that defense before. It seems like Uber's app-based hailing is the reason why poor neighborhoods are able to get serviced.

Previously, no taxi driver would drive around in those areas - because of opportunity cost of higher fares in richer areas, and fears of getting robbed when there was tons of cash in the car.
Adding a new Bytecode instruction to the .NET runtime
Geopolitical stratagy web browser game
The existence of other considerations doesn't validate the poor choices that have already been made. I said at the time that putting a vault on a small island near sea level might not be a great plan given the wholly predictable rise in sea levels over the long term.

It was a predictably stupid decision, and the only surprising part is that the stupidity became obvious so early rather than 50 or 75 years from now as more conservative models of climate change suggested could be the case.

I am absolutely in favor of projects like this that are built to maximize survivability of ecosystems in the face of unpredictable change. But you are saying that all risks are equivalent over the long term and it's impossible to choose between them, which I think is an absurd copout.

The reality here is that there wasn't enough money or political will to invest in something more obviously permanent, so we ended up with a shitty system that has started to fail within a single decade, will now probably have to be decommissioned (because the problem is only likely to get worse), and we've got to start over. It's not a total write-off, much valuable work has been done, but it's plain that trying to cheap out on the location was a dreadful false economy.
Let's please not re-ignite this particular flamewar here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Isn't the way they gain advantage by having the lower price?

(so riders with options will not choose the fair with a larger supplier surplus)

The reason they invest in the technology is because they are able to utilize it across enormous numbers of fares.
It's a piece of culture that has just always been there (from the perspective of my life), it was passed on to me and when we talk about it, he won't have the same understanding as I.

I've been thinking a bit lately about how nothing's the same for him as when I was growing up. These experiences that we can share between generations are special.
What were you using before? Compared to DOS the Unix shell actually seemed a very well designed system. There are a couple of things that are admittedly hard to grasp, redirection being one of them. But I have no problem with mv and ls. By the way, fi closes an if block. A for loop uses do and done.
"Blocking ads" is typically justified because the data is being sent to your computer, which is then rejecting parts of the data.

The other side of this coin is that when you voluntarily send data to the server, what they do with it is generally their business (complying with local laws etc).

If you want to "block tracking" you should prevent your computer from sending trackable data to the server. Complaining that theyre keeping data about you is tilting at windmills: good luck preventing it.
>You're picking edge cases of machines that you can't/couldn't verify

I've personally seen a computer that was upgraded to windows 10 after being left on over the weekend. The user claims that they never clicked on the upgrade and seeing as tons of other people reported the same thing I'm inclined to believe them. Fun fact, rolling back the Windows 10 update frequently doesn't work. The longer you wait after upgrading, the less chance you have of it working IMHO. After seeing this, I figured I'd test it myself and I booted up an old netbook that I had lying around and after running updates on it, it started installing windows 10.

>Yes, Microsoft had some updates that updated some machines but they fixed that so it wouldn't. Yes, MS mad some silly assumptions to cache the update

I've yet to see any reasonable explanation as to how that could possibly have been unintentional. MS just started trying to excuse their BS behavior by lying about what they did and trying to justify it with "but it's an upgrade".

>THis is about the fact that the HVAC company SHOULD have upgraded.

That HVAC company shouldn't have upgraded to Windows 10, they should have upgraded to a reasonable operating system fit for the purpose.

>Windows 10 "Redstone 2" allows you to disable the supposed "spyware"

>As for the ads, its supid easy to turn off the notifications.

Just because I can remove Microsoft's adware and spyware doesn't change the fact that it's spyware and adware. As for being easy to do either of those things, you might as well be speaking Greek to at least 95% of Microsoft's users. It's simple if you know a little bit about Windows, but most users out there don't know much of anything about Windows. Just look at all of the outrage over changing the start button in Windows 8. There was literally hoards of people who couldn't even figure that out. I guarantee you those same Einsteins aren't ever going to figure out how to disable telemetry with third party software or figure out that "Notifications" are all of the ads that they're getting spammed with.

Also, Redstone 2 isn't out yet, and to be honest, I don't have high hopes that Microsoft will allow Home users to completely disable telemetry when it does come out. They've lied about everything else involving Windows 10, why should this be any different?
This explains why we're not allowed to run any PowerShell scripts that are not signed by some IT root certificate on my work laptop. However, given that I can run any arbitrary executable (with user rights), this does seem a bit ridiculous.
It was posted by our head of coaching.

Suspicious? People self post all the time. We didn't run an upvote group, if that's your concern. HN algorithms are way too impressive.
>"Give me immunity, and I'll give you all the evidence that Uber was in on this plan from the start"

I get that Uber is a toxic company, but I'm not sure if immunity is a good idea.

"If you steal on behalf of Big Corp and gets caught, you can just rat out Big Corp and get off scot-free."

Is that really the sort of signal that we want our court systems to send out?
Would you please not troll like this here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This assumption (that only black/brown people need to apply) is very valid and now you try to bend words to make the statement valid for everybody.

If I'll read statement that is completely equivalent
"Any tall (over 6'5") for doing ABC" I would never assume that people not over 6'5" should bother to apply.
I don't really understand this logic. If you are trying to determine which company (all else being equal) is more likely to be successful, would you not take the company that has validation already from a population that is more likely going to be using whatever it is that you are pitching? Essentially you are saying that getting funded by a big name is more indicative of success than consumers who will be using the service/product/etc.
I'm very sorry about your experiences, and at the same time thank you for sharing them.

Here and elsewhere in the thread you make really good points about prevention and about non-obvious benefits of mundane things. That said, within the context of the topic, I can read your remarks in two ways:

1/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so just drop the whole techie do-gooder savior attitude and get back to your job.

2/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so please think about this space hard, and make sure to look at the unsexy, non-obvious places.

I'm not really sure which of the two you mean more, but I'll choose to read it as 2/.
That is an excellent report, thanks!
I've just done a few Google searches for flights (SEA to SFO, LAX to NYC) while logged into two different google accounts, as well as Incognito mode. All the quotes were the same.

I saw the same result on google.ca, and google.co.uk (When adjusted for exchange rates.)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III Arrives on MacOS and Linux
Can you expand on

"Also, the generational hypothesis has nothing to do with whether compaction is profitable. These are orthogonal things."

It is my understanding that these two are strongly linked, at least in practice.

The generational hypothesis states that most (even overwhelmingly most) allocations are unreachable very quickly.

So we employ moving/compacting collectors so that we no longer need to sweep all those dead allocations. These dead allocations are freed at no cost and we only pay for copying the live set.

Having written that, it occurs to me that the sentence I quote read oddly to me because I conflated 'compaction' with 'moving'.

Happy to be corrected on anything written above.
This has probably been beaten to death, but I've found the tv series The Wire to be one of the best portrayals of the actual costs, both acute and diffuse, of waging war against your own people.

You are right in your hunch that it makes treatment a much less taboo subject. The real difference in outcomes comes from treating it as a health issue and not a criminal violation.
There's no way to overblame Microsoft: There was an industry agreement that involved the compromise of DNT not being the default. Microsoft destroyed the entire agreement, which doesn't benefit consumers at all. Worked out great for the advertising and data-collection industries, though.
How many To-do apps do we need?
Gypsy cabs exist for those reasons.
In addition to jobs there are workflows which also offer parallelism but they're a little fickly.
Quality can been self-assessed quite readily, and for tricky situations we usually coach people to develop a supporting network outside of Boost. So far we have paying users who are VPs at large companies all the way to College Students.

And our tech revolves around surfacing quality advice, what works/doesn't work, so it will constantly improve. Still, we don't risk anything -- we do extensive training for coaches.
IBM tells employees working at home to get back to the office
It's good that you mention this and it's an important datapoint for OP's question. That said, I don't think OP gave any indication anywhere to dismiss them as fly-by-night techie seeking social status. There are people (myself included) honestly asking how they could maximize their positive impact on this world, especially using the skills they already have.
Flight QF72: What happens when automation leaves pilots powerless?
This is the most neoliberal thing I've ever read. No, doing nothing will not make the world a better place. And no, our mindless slide into capitalism-in-all-things is not actually good for most people. For one, see the Clinton Foundation's disastrous neoliberalization of Haiti (touted as a success because it "raised people out of poverty"): http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/clinton-found...

In fact, by working for a typical VC-fueled tech company, you're probably helping a few very rich people extract rent more efficiently from a greater number of people. Your best bet for social impact is to do the exact opposite -- get involved in left politics, find ways to show solidarity with people who are being hurt by the Uber-ization and Airbnb-ization of the world, and use your tech skills to counter those effects.
Kotlin is the new Scala, in that it's competing for mindshare in the statically-typed JVM language space. Apache Groovy is a dynamic language, originally intended to complement Java. (Although there's been a static mode since Groovy 2.0, virtually noone uses it.)
Inability to get a particular sound you want in a well-equipped audio production studio is not a problem in 2017.
I'm sorry, but I said nothing about it being pure God-sent miracle. I find that to be a wild misinterpretation of my point.

Generally speaking, you need a certain level of material security to worry about more abstract things like social good -- or even sexual pleasure. Lots of stuff I have read indicates that people in wealthy countries have a great deal more sex and talk and think about it a great deal more than those struggling to get something to eat. It is something of a luxury good. Ironically, the complaints about being a member of the lonely hearts club is generally an indication that you already have some baseline amount of your needs met well enough to bother to notice what you lack in that regard. People who are poor or oppressed enough typically spend all their time worrying about resolving whatever their largest problems are and spend much less time thinking about things like love, sex or romance.

Maslow's pyramid and all that.
To both points: trust is earned over time and we have to actually design our onboarding flows and coaching processes around that idea. It's tricky, but it's how it should work -- we don't expect people to have implicit faith in any system, and actively coach them to question the world around them.

More people question too little than too much, so it's great to see you all are the opposite. :)
That's a recipe for disaster - a burnt out engineer is the last person you want next to a customer emergency in a proof of concept startup. This is one of the reasons why multi-person founding teams are favored by investors.

Regardless if you have 3 people or 23, you have to balance the load between them. Having one person shoulder the responsibility and pain alone leads to resentment, burnout and failure.

Even if you are a non-tech founder, you can chip in by taking pager duty alerts and verifying that they are real and not a false alarm. It's amazing how much a night of sleep after weeks of fires can really help you stay sane.
> 1) All firms start doing it...because what Producer wants to leave money on the table?

That seems to just skirt around the issue. The basic (Econ 101) point of competition is that if all existing firms are making 100 units of profit, and a new firm can make 50 units of profit by offering an equivalent product at a lower price, then that new firm will take business from the existing firms.
> Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?

On the contrary, it was (generally) those in favor of government-mandated privacy and security who heavily supported the DNT efforts. The "Ayn Rand fanboys" just told people to install uBlock Origin
Thank you; this was largely what I was referring to.

I find it deeply troubling that Assange appears to conveniently misunderstand the implications made at him: that he is acting as a willing tool of the Putin administration - not an accusation of publishing falsified documents (although i'll be surprised if it doesn't come to that), but by becoming a mouthpiece for the Kremlin to publish stolen information to advance their anti-democratic interests. Leaks are important and valuable because they empower democratic voters to make informed choices.

Wikileaks repeated derision of leaks since the election of President Trump has been particularly jarring. Leaks -and by this I mean ethically motivated ones, such as Chelsea Mannings- are an important protection mechanism in a democracy; and having a place to publish these is important; which is why I donated to wikileaks several years ago, around the time credit card companies began refusing their donations.

Supporting ethically motivated leaks to uncover wrongdoing is not at all the same thing as supporting a mouthpiece for a foreign regime that steals information and regularly murders journalists. The values that motivate me to support journalism are the ones that have prevented me from supporting Assange over the last couple of years.
I think I've met one person with a dedicated lab grant writer and yeah, I'm pretty sure the PI would take a bullet for them.
Interesting, wasn't aware of that distinction. As it turns out, there's quite a few exceptions[1]. Thanks for correcting me!

[1]: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#se...
> integrating the compiler front end into the IDE became the more popular and successful approach

C and C++ syntax highlighting suffered for decades because it was not possible to do a complete job of it without integrating a compiler front end into the IDE.
Note to mods: I modified the title slightly, as the original was too long. I dropped the word 'pycho' from 'psycho automation' as I felt it had the least impact of any word to substitute or drop from the title.
WannaCry Ransomware Decryption Tool Released; Unlock Files Without Paying Ransom
Sounds like half-reading Adam Smith but OK
Please read it, it's not long. In the article, utilons refer to the utility your help brings, and fuzzies to the feelings they generate in you (which indeed you can see as utility for you, but you could also count it separately).

The point of the article is that if you optimize for utilons, fuzzies and status points separately - e.g. by doing one thing for maximum utility, and then another for maximum fuzzies - you'll be more efficient in all of them than if you try to find one thing that maximizes all three at the same time.