skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As of roughly 5 or more years ago, half of tobacco consumed in the US is by people who are mentally ill and/or substance abusers. For example, people with Schizophrenia are heavy smokers and 90% smoke. Those with clinical depression 60%. They are self-medicating for their underlying illness. We need to ensure that they are getting proper treatment.

Income Disparities in Absolute Cardiovascular Risk and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in the United States, 1999-2014
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28593301

This study shows that in the 15 years studied, only the smoking rate of high income individuals has decreased from 14% to about 9%. Those at the poverty level or below has remained about 36.5% who are smokers (some of those will be the mentally ill and/or substance abusers) and middle income is about 24% who are smokers.

Former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg with his latest donation of $360 million in December, now donated a total of $960 billion to combat tobacco in low- and middle-income countries (e.g. China, Russia, Bangladesh, but also Turkey). Bill Gates added another $125 million.

The plan is to implement the World Health Organization's (WHO) MPOWER program which has been implemented in NYC since 2001. Raising the cost of tobacco has over half the effect of getting people to quit or never start. Also very important is banning smoking in public places and hard-hitting, scary, advertisements spending about $1 to $2 per capita. Clinical interventions such as doctors speaking with patients about quitting, providing nicotine replacement therapy, and telephone counseling support are also important. But most of the gains are from the public policy initiatives.

A frustration I have with the healthcare system in the US is that too little is sent on public health interventions such as MPOWER compared with the spending on clinical interventions. If you want to lower healthcare costs, ultimately more effort has to be put in public health interventions which is much more scalable and more effective than clinical interventions.

Under ObamaCare, smokers can be charged premiums 50% higher than non-smokers because the healthcare costs of smoking are so high, yet most insurance plans don't charge the premium nor does the ObamaCare let insurers really verify if someone is a non-smoker.

If you want to lower the high costs of healthcare, nationally implement MPOWER in the US as well as other public health interventions. ObamaCare made a huge mistake when they did not implement the tobacco tax policies of Canada, UK, France and other nations which have universal care which is pay for the healthcare partially with high tobacco taxes in the range $5 to $7 per pack or more. Our federal tax is about $1. Raising that of these other nations would result in tens of billions of dollars for paying for healthcare while helping people, especially the poor, to quit smoking.
Sadly enough, the poor never eat the middle and upper classes. The upper and the middle may switch and inconvenience the other for a time, but the poor will always be the poor. They never get to go anywhere.
I'm torn because as a consumer (and a corporate consumer), I love to use Google products, they are great.

Working within Googles systems (search, ads, publishing, etc) though has been frustrating at best, ruinious at worst.

I doubt this fine will change Google in any meaninful way though, it will take more such as a top down attitude change or serious anti-trust calls.
What happens to Sprout's Farmers Market?

People seem to think it will be bought, but this would seem to be negative news because the price paid for Whole Foods was about half what Sprout's is trading at.
If Hacker News had gold I would give it to you.
> drastic changes to price, selection, and employee structure.

Yes I think we'll see more customer tracking (data of high-incomers) and more automated checkouts.

And eventually an "organic-lite" low-end brand.

These aren't even particular to Amazon, just competitive measures. WF has spawned a number of competitors in the last 5-10 years. Amazon is just brusque enough to do it.
I once spent a night in the home of an elderly very poor couple on Tenerife, because they offered some sort of service where the husband would fetch people from the ferry, and bring them to the airport the next day. They were so kind. He was near mentally challenged, a super sweet guy working as a garbage man there, so they could just barely afford it. They lived there because she had horrible arthritis and the climate there was the only thing that had ever helped. They had basically no friends there, lived in a poor village in some outskirts, the broken down look over your shoulder kind.

And I still remember how she offered, just to be hospitable, some watered down fruit juice with like just a whiff of alcohol, and how she pointed to her super cheap cigarettes and said with a voice that was so full of cynicism and despair at the same time, that this was her only pleasure. I still remember that voice, the look her face had at that second, some kind of snarl -- not against me, they were so kind to me.. but against her fate I guess, and/or herself. It's impossible for me to describe, but indelible. Like all that misery, that is mostly pent up and that will follow her into the grave, escaping a bit in a short hiss. There is a German saying, to make a good face in a bad situation, and for just a split second, her face stopped doing that altogether, and I will never forget. God forbid that I do.

None of what I'm writing makes sense to anyone I'm sure, but I so wish I could describe the pang I felt then -- and the pang I felt just now, reading the suggestion that, basically, "they" are beyond help anyway, so let's make advertisements shaming people for smoking, so that those who still have something to lose might fear to be associated with those who don't. Would you also say this in the presence of "the" poor? If I could make one invention, it would be something that swaps the brains of humans around every 5 years, completely randomly. People would sober up rather quickly I'm sure.
Well Amazon is not sitting on hordes of cash, just looking to diversify. This is a strategic move for them. I'd say the odds are greater than 50% that WF culture, and in turn the store experience, gets worse. I mean, Amazon had the choice to not turn their website into a flea market, and we know how that went.
But after looking at the source code we found a fatal flaw in this tool: it used Graphviz — a decades old tool written in plain C and compiled to unreadable JavaScript using Emscripten.

Are the "decades old" and "plain C" aspects supposed to be bad things? It seems like the real problem is "compiled to unreadable JavaScript". Graphviz is a great example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
They also have barcodes on just about every side of the packaging. The cashiers don't have to figure out which side is the one with the barcode, they can just slide it across the scanner in whichever orientation it's on the belt. This makes checkout super efficient.
At least historically, the understanding is that universities prepare for an academic career, while apprenticeship ("Ausbildung"), dual education ("das duale System"), and – since the 1970's – universities of applied sciences ("Fachhochschulen") prepare for the job.
What’s at Stake in President Trump’s Order to Revamp Apprenticeship Programs
OT. Can I contact you to review my portfolio?
>I know that there are some stories about bad experiences in the fulfillment centers, but keep in mind that those positions are temporary seasonal work by unskilled labor

But keep in mind poor non-tech people are trash and you can treat them like it!
I was able to quit my 1/2 pack a day addiction four years ago after 15+ years, but it was challenging. Smoking was expensive (four years ago: 4 packs a week = $40), but quitting smoking was even more expensive. In addition to the expense of Chantix, I also started surfing Amazon for things to reward myself instead of going outside for a smoke break. So it was probably $100 - $200 a week.
Now nicotine-free for 4+ years, it's less costly all around (not to mention the health costs), but I understand all too well the difficulty and economics of quitting.
Out of curiosity, what's your insight into grocery store profit margins? Were you an exec at a grocery chain, or something giving a similar window into their numbers?
Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?
I'm college student, working as a part-time Java developer. During summer I would like to work on a side project, which includes building a webpage from a scratch. It is not a billion dollar startup idea, in fact, it probably won't be profitable at all, I'm doing it only for fun and to learn new things. The thing is, I don't know anything about webdesign except for some basic html and css and I don't want to spend whole summer learning javascript and responsive design, because it would feel more like a chore to me, when it is supposed to be interesting and fun. I'm looking for a front-end developer (Angular/React/...), who would join me and together we would attempt to create something. No rush, no deadlines, no salaries. So the question is:

Is there a place where can I find people looking for something to work on and expecting nothing, but an experience in return?

EDIT: HN won't let me to reply to all comments, because I am "submitting too fast". I just want to clarify - I don't want someone to make whole webpage for me. I just want to do the classical split between backend (I'll do that) and frontend. That's like how it is done in most of the companies.
A large majority of the energy used in paper mills comes from the bark of the trees. Logs have to be debarked before they can be pulped and the bark eventually becomes fuel that supplies power to much of the mill.
All Right here (South of the Brazil)
The article cites no scientific evidence (references), follows no scientific methods and can be regarded as biased. To strengthen my point, the articles compares 5.3 / retired in 1970 vs 1.6/retired in 2050 without taking into account automation or scientific / technological progress. The analysis is therefore unsound.
short-term boosterism is the cause of more than a few problems in our economic system
No one is arguing that the people who work on Whole Food's website are going to suffer a significant drop in the quality of their work experience.

It's a fair supposition, however, that Whole Food's front line staff (who map to the warehouse employees that Amazon absolutely treats like garbage) probably will.
Video: Colonoscopy Robot and Other Weird Biomedical Bots
Tableau Drops 'Crowd Favorite' Data Viz Awards Because China Bans Twitter Voting
I still use the default Gmail client on the phone for personal.
The difference is when poor people screw up, they suffer, when rich people screw up everyone else suffers [1][2][3][4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007–2008

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo

[3] http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/08/technology/business/yahoo-ve...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California.27s_deregulat...
Practice and sharp knives will dramatically change how quickly you can prep, cook, serve and cleanup a blue apron or plated meal. I can usually beat the estimated time by 10+ minutes.
I've used it a couple of times (for School uniform for my kids, cheaper than Amazon), however Amazon have their pickup lockers closer to where I live, and with no (slow) human interaction (as at Tesco), it's normally a winner for me.
> As I've argued in a differnet post, the problem isn't too little theoretical knowledge, it's that uni is just seen as "the highest" and people who just want practical knowledge go to a place which is supposed to give you deep insight into the theories and research in your field because it gives the status qualification.

People who went to a school not matching their needs and desires have no right to blame their bad choice on the school or on "the system", when better matching schools where perfectly available. If someone takes a course they hate for "status" the problem is entirely in their head, because that's where perceptions of status reside. And besides, switching is possible and does happen (even on the pre-academic age level, but it is much more difficult and rare there)

> but for example my alma mater has started offering part time degrees, with 25% of the workload required per semester and twice the allowed maxmimum study time.

This is a great idea (even if the "25%,twice" ratio puzzles me a bit), it basically formalizes what "perpetual students" had been doing for decades, if not for generations, before the "rush the kids to a degree" reforms. People who only take a small number of courses and even less exams each year won't have consumed more university resources when they get their degree at some unforeseeable time in the future than people who rush through.
There was more to it than just a single shop.

Some random HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13432098
Having started out at a University and switched to a Fachhochschule (Bachelor CS for both) I can say that there weren't more practical things at the FH, but everything was simply way easier. Math was simpler (mostly because it was usually applied as opposed to proofs, so I guess math was indeed more practical) and the CS courses were way below what the university offered. So I'd say it's certainly understandable when people look down on FH (because it can easily be the case that it's subpar)
Not if you were born recently.
still no generics :(
Yes, but it took 20 years for Kasparov to find that grace. After losing game 2 of the 1997 match to Deep Blue, he accused the IBM team of cheating, by allowing a human grandmaster to override DB at a critical moment in the game. He repeated this bogus claim for many years, before finally coming to his senses.
I notice this in sick kids. A decent fever and no eating and they smell this way quite quickly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketonuria
well, he was pressured by his board to sell, so, not the most successful.
> Using exec has several benefits:

> - The exit code of the wrapper will automatically become the exit code of wrapped_tool. Of course, you can achieve the same effect if you use set -e in the shell script.

False. Exit code of the last executed command is the exit code of the whole
script.

> - While running, only the wrapped_tool is in memory, the shell is wiped out on exec and no longer uses any resources (memory, process scheduling, ...)

True.

> - The process name and path is wrapped_tool, not the shell script.

True, but it's not always a benefit (from my experience, when it actually
matters it's usually a drawback).

> - If the wrapper is supervised and the caller decides to kill it, it will kill directly the wrapped_tool. Otherwise, it would only kill the shell and wrapped_tool might continue to run in the background.

This is true only for broken supervisors. Supervised process should be put in
a process group, so supervisor can send a signal to the whole process group.
I've been using these "Ogami Collection" notebooks apparently made from limestone for a while now: https://origin68.com/collections/notebooks-stationery/produc...

They're like much more durable Moleskins, in my experience.
I mean keeping an ambulance outside the doors to a warehouse because its cheaper than cooling it is a tad inhumane.
What do you mean? Currently I can have fresh groceries delivered to my door by an Amazon Fresh truck or I can drive to a local Amazon Fresh pickup store...
The ‘time machine’ reconstructing ancient Venice’s social networks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA2-iMz479o

I watched this video a while ago about what Amazon Go is a precursor for. In summary, if AWS is renting out server infrastructure for people, then you can imagine that Amazon can make the infrastructure to lease out Amazon Go to other stores. They first integrate it with Whole Foods, then as customers expect no more checkout areas, they will only go to Whole Foods because it's faster and maybe cheaper. Then because customers want it everywhere, Amazon could force other stores like Walmart and Target to integrate Amazon Go infrastructure to their stores, without Amazon directly competing with these stores, and make a ton of money leasing it out without spending money on building whole new stores. Of course, the acquisition could also be like nodes for warehousing and delivery, but both avenues are not mutually exclusive.
HelloFresh automatically re-activated my membership when I thought it was paused, with no notification until after they'd charged my card on file and shipped a week's worth of food. Never touching them again.

Home Chef proactively emails you a week ahead of time telling you what the menu is. I've forgotten to customize my meal selection once or twice, but have been happy enough with the defaults for the "carb conscious" eater profile that I never really have to.

Don't think I had any major issues with Blue Apron, except that yeah, their recipes were simplistic, and often used lots of bread, rice, and potatoes.
I agree that CC licenses aren't a good fit for data collections. I have been meaning to create a new license but I don't have the expertise or credibility to reasonably market it. ODbL seems really close to what I was envisioning. Thanks!
Most Dangerous Ransomware of All Times
You can do multi-cursor stuff in Atom too. I rarely jump into vim for macros anymore, multi-cursor handles most things.
It's the other way around. Aldi owns Trader Joe's.
https://twitter.com/KwokMiles
I would definitely guess not.

Why would Amazon pick and pack from a retail store and not a distribution center?

And what does Instacart bring to the table?

Amazon already has a website and seems to have no trouble building gigantic on-demand workforces. What else does Instacart have? I would guess close to 100% of Instacart users already use Amazon for things as well.

I don't see things ending up well for Instacart at all.
Not the op, but I don't have enough evidence to either agree or disagree with your idea, and I would like to see some evidence either way before policies are set. Lots of things that seem intuitive turn out the opposite way when research is done.

Even defining "illegal terrorist violence" globally is tricky. What is illegal in one country often isn't in another. One person's illegal terrorism is another's rebellion against corrupt government.

"Supressing such narratives" can easily become censoring anyone who disagrees with those in power and until I see evidence that such suppression is actually effective, and that safeguards are in place to prevent it going to far, I'll always err on the side of freedoms over censorship.
Which is why we need instant-runoff voting in the US, so we can vote for third party candidates but still choose between the top two candidates if our preferred candidate loses.
A theory postulated without evidence: Considering throughout history power and wealth inequality was in many ways much worse (monarchies, despotism, no voting rights without land etc) I wonder if the current distribution is simply an artifact of genetic changes that have already occurred. Perhaps the slum dwellers of yesteryear adapted to those conditions and now in some way subconsciously seek them out.
Didn't Blue Apron file for IPO yesterday?! Their staff must be crushed by this.
Thank you very much for this description. I did not understand the implications or effect the change had. My question is - as a number of exchanges operating in the US (polo, kraken, GDAX) require Id's or some form of verification, what changes are really required? New AML/Compliance departments?

Also will individuals P2P transmitting cryptocurrency have to perform these same checks?
bingo...

Implementation will be key. But I also agree in believing that this will be their strategy.
Or how about simply not succumbing to the latest UI trends, which will be different next year anyway?
Wasn't Google a market economy internally?
There's one key difference that the retail employees are interacting with customers whereas the distribution center employees are hidden away in the factory. Not sure how important this difference will be, but it could definitely influence the company's behavior.
> you'll be perceived as disingenuous.

or just, quite rightly, ignorant to economic causation.
From the article: "In place of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin."

200 kilograms of polyolefin, a class of compounds produced by polymerization of alkenes, which are derived from petrochemicals or ethanol, both of which come from water-intensive sources.

Also, is this stuff biodegradable at all? It's basically stone dust infused with an extremely stable plastic. This stuff would last a thousand years in a landfill...
> have a generic version that overrides the properties (with new)

is the horrible bit. You should almost NEVER override with "new".
Amazon is a tech and logistics company. I doubt very much that their strategy is "buy random company, lower pay of employees, profit". This was a very strategic move for them and I am sure they intend to use their tech and distribution platform to increase the profit, rather than slice and dice the store experience and quality at the local level. This is what differentiated WF from many other grocery stores that I'm sure Amazon could have bid on, why would they want to ruin the one thing it had going for it?
I wish! If there's any publication we could stand to read less of, it's WaPo.
Whether they are self-made or not is not the right question to ask, it's whether their parents were rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

Even if most millionaires are self-made, many of them are still born to affluent parents that gave them the opportunities to get there.
Agreed, although I imagine it's probably the norm unfortunately.
it is because of China cyber attack. Guowengui(郭文贵） will
expose Chinese govement corruption on youtube today
(Mis-)Quoting John Steinbeck, "the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires".

This can be a powerful driver. And if it gets people to stop smoking, which is a devastatingly unhealthy habit, well, I'm ok with that.
The thing that killed me was I needed way more pots than I wanted to use; I usually try to go for one- or two-pot meals.
They used neo-nazis at a fullfilment center in Germany to keep immigrant laborers in line, so...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-used-...
Manage a fleet of microservices locally with Docker