skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that?

In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books.

The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be based on the # of books the retailer has purchased, but the system right now successfully prevents price wars. And yes, I am happy with that, because it ensures that authors get proper funding instead of having to fight for the scraps.

> Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle prices, because it's considerably cheaper to sell a 12 meg file than a 200 page physical book

The printing and distribution costs of a book are not that high, once you have a significant enough mass of books. What Amazon wants to do here is squeeze the authors off their profit, and this must be prevented.

Books are culture, and culture must not be bowing to the demands of predatory capitalism or else we'll sooner or later live in a Idiocracy world with a movie called "*ss" the sole Oscar winner... (okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, it's a danger to culture!)
> I hate how Amazon doesn't support Paypal

This might be the first time someone has been upset that paypal support is lacking. I am surprised by this considering the general distaste for paypal typically.

What makes you wish paypal was supported if you don't mind me asking?
Just to confirm - this is satire, right? You're riffing on people like Nicholas Taleb and Stephen Wolfram?

I'm not completely sure I get the joke.
This I like from it:

* Dirty schedulers: This allows easy integration of blocking C-based libraries. So for example can wrap something like RocksDb and make it available to the rest of the VM easier. Or libcurl and others.

* DTLS documented in the API, experimental : This lets it parse and talk to WebRTC clients

* Erlang literals are no longer copied when sending messages : This is kinda of a sneaky one. By default With some exceptions Erlang VM usually copies data when it sends messages. However, in this case module literals (constants, strings, etc) will be another thing that's not copied when messages are sent between processes. There is a hack to dynamically compile configuration value or other tables of constants as a module at runtime. So if you use that hack, you'd get a nice performance boost.

* code_change, terminate and handle_info callbacks optional in the OTP behaviors. This is very nice. I always wondered why I had to write all that boiler plate code.
Elaborate....
It's essentially the same mechanism: the terminology is immediately understood. The market is public opinion, in a rather special public. If these people all 'short' Uber, it might not even go public. I guess the equivalent would be trying to take all the VC money back? And obviously the equivalent to a long position would be investing more VC money in Uber.

Nobody would seriously argue that there's no difference between the two because Uber doesn't exist yet in 'stock' terms. They need to translate the initial investor enthusiasm into an IPO, so short/long spells out the likely climate for said IPO.
I built a little script to export my accounts to CSV/QIF. Super easy to use API! https://github.com/scottrobertson/teller-export
I see this "incumbents" narrative touted a lot, but it just ain't so. Non-medallion livery companies (black cabs) have been in NYC for a looooong time.
Please report your difficulties to the Support Team: https://protonmail.com/support-form You don't need to be a paid user to do this. They will respond to your ticket. I have done this before - some time ago. But, perhaps a bug was introduced somewhere in the code or there is some other issue that you are running into (perhaps some configuration with the local platform). It should be possible and work correctly.
I for one support globalization because it's how me and all my friends escaped the fate of our parents. Working all your life for $20k/year in a tiny little country in Europe. Without globalization we'd all be fucked.

If we could get skills and jobs that rival Bay Area or are in Bay Area from half the world away, why can't someone from Atlanta? What's stopping them? What, realistically, are the missinh opportunities for them compared to someone who couldn't even practically communicate in English until high school or so?

Like, I'm sorry person from Atlanta, you were born in the land of opportunity. I had to not only get here first, but also realize that such a thing is even possible.
Would be interesting to see if the first ever Space nation gets recognized by the UN
Some things I like from the new release:

* Dirty schedulers: This allows easy integration of blocking C-based libraries. So for example can wrap something like RocksDb and make it available to the rest of the VM easier. Or libcurl and others.

* DTLS : This lets it talk to WebRTC clients

* Erlang literals are no longer copied when sending messages : This is kinda of a sneaky one. By default (with exception of large binaries) Erlang VM usually copies data when it sends messages. However, in this case module literals (constants, strings, etc) will be another thing that's not copied. There is a hack to dynamically compile configuration values or other tables of constants as a module at runtime. So if you use that hack, you'd get a nice performance boost.

* code_change, terminate and handle_info callbacks optional in the OTP behaviors. This is very nice. I always wondered why I had to write all that boiler plate code.

Also here is a detailed list of changes:

http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_20.0-rc2.readme
Exactly. I think the 0.1% or 0.01% are the ones who truly warp our political/economic system but it is the top 10% or 20% who lock in that warped system by engaging in forms of political NIMBYism to prevent any real change. (see the Democratic party's relationship with progressives and their funders: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/11/warren-goldman-dccc/)
Wow. This is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks a lot for creating and sharing this list.
How to Get More App Downloads by Rethinking Your Mobile Marketing Strategy
> This idea that there "were no taxis" in the boroughs and now there are is ridiculous.

The few times I tried to take those services the service was horrible, horrible.

Now, thankfully, Uber is available and they have much better service and they have a single identifiable reliable brand and they take credit cards.

Uber pool where unrelated riders ride in the same car are going to have less greenhouse gas than riders taking separate cars. This is logical.
>> When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said to get $10k more per year. Today I would say, getting an extra year at $30k is enough.

As someone who works in the bay area, I can throw a rock and probably hit someone who will give me a job in software engineering. For all of our collective complaints about how bad the interview process is, the reality is that we have choice and mobility.

This is a big deal and your take on this is spot on!
I don't know if that is true -- I'm looking at a flag flapping around out my window and there is tons of interesting dynamics! Think also dresses or other clothing.
Aye. I got Prime when we needed diaper subscriptions.

Later when watching TV on the big screen would keep the little one up, Prime Video was the only way to watch a lot of things (on the PC).

Want the shipping, want the video.
The Paradox of American Restaurants
Indeed. The CEO of Sears was recently sued by investors:

http://www.businessinsider.com/sears-ceo-will-pay-40-million...
No, it's a small country and relatives usually live in other towns.
> may be even a sound input

Bingo. When we drive a vehicle, we use so much more than just our eyes to sense the environment, and hearing plays a very large part.

I believe that it is something that warrants research for self-driving vehicle usage; I don't know if anyone has done such research, but I haven't seen any papers on it yet. If not, it seems like an underappreciated sensor aspect that could potentially greatly augment self-driving vehicle capabilities, and would be a very simple and cheap sensor to add to a vehicle as well.

EDIT: Found this recent article...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604272/a-sense-of-hearing...

While it seems to be focused mainly on diagnosing issues with vehicles before they become larger problems, there are hints about it being used for self-driving tasks as well.
Is Amazon Video really a competitor? Their prime offering is shit. Hulu, to me, is a far more viable competitor. Amazon Video is only good for buying or renting. Their free offerings are terrible.
Remove juvenile after 75% of
At least you acknowledge you want something unreasonable.
Nice:

When a gen_server crashes, the stacktrace for the client will be printed to facilitate debugging.
I am not bullish on cryptocurrency at all.

BUT...

If a tipping point comes, it won't come from your grandparents, or your parents in 20 years time. It will come from India or Africa where banking is not entrenched (or even available) for most of the population. Where the technology landscape is completely different and they are already leapfrogging the west in some areas such as mobile payments and banking.

I don't think that cryptocurrencies will take off in a big way, but Im pretty certain that if we do, it won't be from the west, and won't be for a reason that we recognise (or that the crypto-fanatics are shouting about).
A primer on time-series data
I guess that was quite some time ago?

Back then we had a shell script hack that was called by the GCC configure script and parsed the target triplet to set these versions.

Fortunately that's long gone and we now simply add some D specific code to the platform configuration files in gcc/config/ . The shell script hack would have never passed the GCC review ;-)
i couldnt find any normal code -> your new system examples that made sense. can you post a short one here? like 10 lines or something?
How do you figure? D is C++ with lessons learned. I mean, it's right there in the name. I find very few similarities between Go and D. Also, D is much older than Go so if anything Go would be D if D decided to not be a "systems" programming language (but it's plainly obvious that isn't the case).
Rapid’s marketplace for every API
A company, or a business. Note that I did not say there wouldn't be business or companies... just not corporations because those are a specific legal entity that are created by the State.
Seconding this, the use of predictable actually makes me think the article isn't worth it.
The reason it was predictable can be explained by examining two concepts used in public policy theory:

Pareto Improvement: A change that is an improvement for at least one person and no worse for any other.

Kaldor-Hicks Improvement: A change such that those that are made better off could hypothetically compensate those that are made worse off and lead to a Pareto-improving outcome.

It turns out that people aren't particularly thrilled with hypothetical compensation. Who could ever have imagined that?
It's not even the "1%", it's the "1% of the 1%", Zuckerberg is great no doubt, but does he really deserve 2000X as much as a high level machine learning researcher?

The issue is that ~6-8 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 40% of the world, that's not because of eight software engineers making $100K.
First I can't follow the 80% math, on the OpenCL benchmark that they got the 80% number. At best the iMac 2015 has 74% performance of the 2017 iMac at the top end of both.

Additionally, when you are still in the same ball park as with the high end of the Mac Pro, from 2013, seems also wrong. A lot has happened in the GPU space in the last 4 years, so this seems odd. Maybe it isn't fair to compare to the Mac Pro, as it isn't clear if that GPU was SLI'd or not, but it's their graph.

Of course there is no comparison to other non-apple systems.

I'm flagging this story as it's pure fluff, in my eyes.
Not being from SF, how long is that ride and how many share the ride?
If you're an Elixir dev, it pays to both keep an eye on Erlang and learn its standard library (the parts not implemented in Elixir). There's a lot stuff already in there that you don't have to reinvent when doing Elixir. And of course, every OTP release directly affects Elixir.
So you were lucky (to be smart enough) to out-compete your peers and a bunch of Americans. By definition not everyone can achieve this success (as it's based on competition), so it does nothing to alleviate inequality on a scale that matters.
yep yep. What should be discussed is why the C-section rate is much higher than it should be in US.
How to Get More Subscribers for Your ECommerce Website
I agree that we should doubt that the populism was predictable. Ex-post many people claim things could have been predictable but I would argue against this political movement as a Black Swan. The main point in Taleb's book is that Black Swans are /critically/ a result of inductive reasoning. Black Swans events are called such because black swans used to be a mythic creature that people would refer to because they had never been seen.
Adobe Notches Beat Again with Sales Outlook on Cloud Demand
Slack makes hard for companies to charge money for these apps. I think it is cool but probably not enough reason to make people to move.

One thing that would make me consider it, if I could open multiple windows at the same time for example.
It is funny that people say "we should be paid hourly" but any job I've ever had with hourly pay I did as little as I possibly could. Possibly because I was a stoned teenager in food service. But even as a salaried employee, I don't often feel like I'm here because they need me every hour from 9 to 5 - I feel like I'm here because I can do some things and if I weren't here at all they'd be in trouble.

Anyway, I was also a stoned teenager in food service when I got a job at a pizza shop delivering pies. No hourly pay, just $20 a day plus a $2/$5/$10 delivery fee depending on how far you were from the shop. I kept all the tips and payday was 11:30 or so every night. I've never worked harder or felt better about work than I did coming home with my pockets full of money at the end of the day - it was clear that my showing up and busting my ass made me my paycheck. Ironically, this is called "getting paid under the table" and it's illegal.
> And you are still completely incorrect about CSS being a programming language.

Nope.
> Parent comment said "believe women who..."

Luckily we have the power of inference and ability to understand what statements mean even when people use different words -- unless, of course, we have an axe to grind, which is what I'm seeing here in your comments.

Your counter arguments haven't convinced me. But it was nice discussing this. Hopefully others will see this thread and make their own decisions.
People need to realize there is not enough for everyone. Apple just hit 1 billion iphones. Facebook is close to 2 billion. There are 7.5 billion people on earth. They all want iphones, facebook, AC, food, clean water. You can see where this is going and it's not good.

I personally think its almost made worse by the internet and people being connected, they see and feel what they are missing. Most Africans, for example, would kill to be in Europe / USA.
Yes really.

movfuscator doesn't really obfuscate all that much, other than just being weird.

It's whole shitck is to compute offsets into it's memory space differently based on the input data, but not change the instruction stream based on the data. That way computations that shouldn't contribute to the final result are simply given a scratch offset that isn't read back, but the instruction stream never deviates.

This SIMD code is also ultimately computing different offsets into memory space (contributing 0 to that lane's offset on each iteration if that SIMD lane has already found the node it's looking for), but keeping the instruction stream consistent across the 'separate' lanes.
Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year.

Not so long ago, people were saying exactly the same thing about Walmart.
A couple years ago when Colorado legalized it I made a list of openly traded companies, thinking it'd be a huge investment opportunity.

I was too risk-averse to jump in, but I found my list of potential stocks and their prices about a year later. Of the dozen or so stocks, about half were delisted, one or two were at about 80% of what they'd been then, and the rest were on life support.

Anecdotally, I took it as a good thing I'd stayed out. Really, each of these companies I had very little information about other than that they were "doing that new thing everyone's excited about". So... if you're going to invest, make sure you know the company you invest in and aren't just following the advice of a puff piece courting your cash.
We have a Python library called pyQuil [1] for writing high-level programs for quantum computers. The "assembly" you mentioned is Quil [2], which we don't expect most users to use directly.

Other high-level languages for quantum computing include LIQUi|> [3] and Quipper [4]. Each approach has it's strengths, but we believe Quil/pyQuil is the best choice for near-term applications. See the Quil paper [5] for more details.

[1]: https://pyquil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2]: https://medium.com/@rigetticomputing/introducing-quil-a-prac...

[3]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/language-in...

[4]: http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/

[5]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.03355.pdf
To me, D's compile-time features like templates, code generation, etc. are some of its most important features. Lacking those and exceptions and many other useful bits, Go cannot compare to D. (I finally can claim experience on both languages after having coded Go for about a month.)
I do agree with you to an extent but I wasn't talking about people mastering the language themselves. I was talking about them starting the process (bear in mind this is in relation to the GP comment about giving his cousin a laptop).

Maybe I'm being unreasonable but 80% of what I know is self taught. Though I accept that I'm an edge case here as I -stupidly- decided to go into full time work instead of university. But that's a different topic entirely. However much of what I learned predates the proliferation of the web. In fact the first two languages I learned was in the 80s so literally do predate the web. Yet I managed fine with books borrowed from the library and a lot of trial and error.

Perhaps things are harder now because there is too much choice in languages and too many blocks on the software stack you need to be aware of. I also don't particularly consider web development a good starting place to learn development because it's full of different technologies that work semi-independently (server side code, SQL, Javascript, CSS, HTML, different browser rendering engines, etc) and not to mention the complexities of writing stateless and secure code.

One of the great things of being a child in the 80s was your personal computer made a great introductory programming system. You got a simple language to code in and instance results back. But I've now drifted way off topic so I feel I should apologise for the soliloquy.
Globalization unlocks the potential of top 5% types stuck in underdeveloped countries. At the same time, it often undermines the prosperity of bottom 2/3 types born in wealthy countries. As a matter of democratic theory, however, the political establishment's duty is to the majority of the populace in their own country, not to untapped potential in other countries.
Sorry, but I really don't know what you're trying to say. Corporations are actually a violation of the way "normal human cooperation and society" work, since they break the connection between an activity and liability for that action.
Uber Can’t Be Fixed – It’s Time for Regulators to Shut It Down
Adobe acquires Mettle’s SkyBox tools to expands its VR video portfolio
He's citing an article about the Culler-Fried system. This accepted math notation on a screen in the 1960s. A modern equivalent is Mathcad, which supports standard mathematical formula notation on input.

(I used to use Mathcad when it cost about $200. It's quite nice. Now it's $595/year.)
Is there like a why's poignant guide to ruby for erlang?http://poignant.guide/book/
Hm, ok. We'll here in Europe things are a bit different. Most people travel, it is pretty easy to do so and even the 'poor' (students, people that only have bikes) move from city to city regularly.

I've got acquaintances from all over the planet though, and even there most people travel with some regularity to other cities. Holidays, family visits and so on, and then of course there is business travel which I would assume is one of the larger customer groups for Uber/taxis.
I meant incoming webhooks. These are outgoing webhooks.
> People keep saying that, and yet prices still haven't risen.

Uber is still losing money hand over fist. It has to come to an end at some point, either when they finally raise prices or they just go bankrupt.

> It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?

A couple reasons:

1. VCs don't "give away money". They invest, with the expectation that their investment will be returned many times over. Given that it is explicitly Uber's goal to have a monopoly on transportation, you can extrapolate what that means for their intended pricing strategy if they ever manage to take over.

2. While taxis may or may not be an example of this, it's important to realize that VC-backed dumpi^H^H^H^H^Hpromotional pricing can destroy existing businesses even if those businesses were competitive and sustainable. For example: wash.io, which I commented about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376#13608798. They shuttered a whole bunch of laundromats in SF, which was all for nothing since they went out of business anyway. That's not a healthy dynamic.
Startup Deploying Network of Edge Data Centers at Telecom Towers
I don't disagree with that assertion about Wal-Mart either. The only bright spot in this mess is that these two titans are limiting each other's growth while less outrageously sized entities try to work out how to not have their economies completely rewired without a chance to react.
For the love of god, stop the hyperbole, and try to understand the comments you are answering better.

I think that's good advice, very often applicable, even on HN.

Sometimes, s/even/especially/.
One of the first names that comes to my mind regarding the prediction of the right-wing populism is Camille Paglia.

Now while I agree with the point you're trying to make, it seems to me that the main motivation behind the article is that there are political climates when the changes are inevitable; and the question this article is trying to answer is when should we listen to the individuals rather than take the larger picture of the opinion landscape?
Colorado dad gives sons smartphones, regrets it, now wants to ban preteen use
I hear your "if tipping is not expected then" but I don't see a plan of action to make this the case. Wages may be artificially depressed by the construct of tipping, but shutting off the prospect of tips, does not magically increase wages.

This reminds me of the time that Donald Trump told everyone he hasn't heard any criticism of the DAPL, and meanwhile there is a massive #TurnOnYourPhone campaign aimed at him on Twitter, because the White House comment line had been closed since he took office.

Shutting down the conduit does not magically erase the demand! The demand is still there, it's just not visible anymore.
They lost me at "...call customer service..."