skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure. My hypotheses:

1. Executable code provides a fast feedback loop that doesn't require instruction. That's hard to find especially for mathematics.

2. You don't really have to understand what you're doing in order to build something. So you can do useful stuff -- which is great for motivation etc. -- and then use that stuff to probe and gain a greater understanding.

3. The psychology is favorable to self-study because there aren't long periods of self-study before the material becomes truly useful.

4. A lot of CS is just more difficult. No one asks why Analysis is more difficult than Calculus -- it seems like a silly question on face. Maybe programming vs CS is similar.

2 and 3 are kind of a function of 1.
You can do a lot more than look at it. You can modify it, compile it, share your modifications, and share your binaries with your game.

The one major thing you can't do is redistribute the base source code. That's a big thing, and disqualifies it from being open source, but let's not pretend there is no value in the source code access.
Sounds like a project. Match students seeking jobs (and who have some experience) with employers similar to those in the OA.

UK: it tends to be waiting/bar staff in my local Universities as lower skill requirements and more flexible working times
This (issuing/signing certs these/similar hostnames) was permitted in the past. It is no longer permitted.
I use FastComet - quickest support response time, blazing fast servers, basically everything you could ask for in a hosting platform, and can pay as low as a couple USD a month.
I believe most consumer industries have consumer surplus, since different customers are willing to pay different prices but the companies can only charge one price. This includes the taxi companies that Uber displaced. From reading the abstract, this paper does not calculate the additional consumer surplus generated by Uber beyond taxis.

Note that it doesn't follow that Uber would make more money simply by raising prices -- consumer surplus measures the amount Uber could make by charging each user their "true" value, but if Uber simply raised prices, then they would lose demand.

However, Uber is actually starting to use price discrimination (i.e., charge different users different prices based on their characteristics), which would eliminate consumer surplus [1].

[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/uber-s-ne...
carmel didn't quite have the saturation of drivers as uber and so you don't have to "think ahead" to hitch a ride. Certainly the smart phone allowed animated maps to pacify the client but, also, for foreign travelers, didn't really need to speak a different language to convey source and destination (as well as credit card info). Plus all the tracking of the driver for peace of mind from a safety pov.
The project is very interesting, but I'm not sure why they are doing it. How is that protecting user rights? This doesn't measure AI/ML progress that's available to state actors.
'Startup visa' is one term for it, 'buy-a-visa' is another.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad idea; someone with vision and money may be able to contribute a lot to the economy. But handing them a visa for cash and a couple of years of supplying jobs feels very transactional. It says, "you can come here as long as you earn lots of money," not, "you can come here as long as you contribute lots to the economy."
Necessary is the wrong way to look at it, it was a consequence of the growth above all strategy.

They broke into markets with disregard for the law, often it backfired, often it didn't.

Allegedly(as it is being investigated) they also "stole" IP from Alphabet in an attempt to get ahead in the self-driving gold rush.

They repeatedly ignored several sexual harassment reports in order to protect someone who they referred to as a "high performer", in the name of growth, they could not afford to lose a high performer.

In the startup/VC/unicorn hype world growth is king, it comes before profit, revenue, employee wellbeing, customer satisfaction, business and work ethics.

Uber is not the first guilty of this, it's just the extreme case.
Ethereum Flash Crashes by 96% After Status ICO Clogs Network
Congrats Jocelyn!
Parametric fonts go back to at least metafont.

Pretty sure you can do all the transformations indicated on the page in 'native' metafont.
If you go into subway and an employee stabs you for no good reason you sue subway
Apple has been known to be a greedy company when it comes to vendors etc. ... feel it's on the wrong side of time ... many other brands are catching up ...
A lingua franca's ideal should be to be easy to learn, able to express lots of things. English is easy to start with, but hard to master, and its expressiveness isn't ideal either, often having to import words from other languages where english has no word for a concept itself.
Wouldn't multi-master replication be bad for write throughput? Depending on the scheme, it will have to be committed to all machines for every write, therefore increasing write operation complexity.

If you want to scale up your writes, sharding would be a better solution.
At this point the thread becomes generically ideological, so we detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14604196 and marked it off-topic.
Apple will win this battle. WeChat is tightly monitored by the Chinese government for any sensitive info, and heavily censored. It's losing appeal. The problem has grown more and more serious recently since there is a hot political war going on, and messages published on Twitter and YouTube are propagated on WeChat. The YouTube attack on 6/16 is part of the war.

Generally Uncle Donald is right on trade. China's great firewall is a major trade barrier. China's Internet industry does not have foreign competition. Uncle Sam should be much tougher on trade deals.
US Exchange GDAX Suspends Ethereum Trading After ‘Flash Crash’ to 10 Cents
Even the automated ones are dangerous to be close to, apparently. There's a characteristic type of snarl-up known as a "cobble" where white-hot steel rod flies everywhere: https://youtu.be/uxbsgWOjX5o
I live in Harlem and even in Harlem it is hard to get a Taxi in Harlem. Cab drivers regularly would discriminate against minorities who needed cabs. Uber changed all of that. Now cabs are happy to see me when I flag one down. Car Service is usually pretty horrible. The cars are dirty on the inside and they will typically overcharge you for a trip. I made the mistake of paying 20 bucks for a trip that would've been a $7 cab fare and maybe an even cheaper with an Uber/Lyft.
> Being a resident of California I think the country would have been better off with Jerry Brown, but his expression of support for Jesse Jackson at the wrong time put paid to that.

I don't disagree with either part of that (heck, I voted for Brown in the primary), but really the Democratic candidate pool was really weak in 1992 because Bush seemed strong until too late for anyone to credibly enter the primary race; Clinton managed not to lose while fumbling on Bush's biggest weakness, but he crippled the Democratic Party nationally for at least a generation in the process.

> I've got to say as a Euro that while I support that sort of pro-labor welfare state agenda on a policy level, I feel Democrats in the have a bad habit of overestimating its popularity at the strategic level where elections are won.

I don't think they are; quite the opposite, they usually fail to campaign on it, and when they push it in policy they fatally compromise it out of the gate (not as part of a negotiation to win votes from the other side) to serve corporate and moneyed interests, both of which are signs that they don't trust it electorally. This is even the case for things like public-paid universal healthcare, which had majority support in polling for years before Clinton was elected (and much of the time after, including through the passage of the ACA, though not always recently), where both Clinton and Obama pushed for complex, private-insurer-dependent programs that were harder for people to understand and much easier political targets for opponents.

The Third Way has been bad for Democrats as a party in government (whatever short term electoral benefit it can be argued, IMO unconvincingly, to have had in 1992 specifically) and worse for the policy interests Democrats (before and after it) claim to support, because it radically shifted the Overton window to the right.
Things are not that simple.

When people talk about UBI as a solution for machines taking all the work, they can't be sure the machines will take all the work, but they can be absolutely sure 99% of the people will need to retrain, maybe for years, and try again and again until they find something worthwhile. And our current society simply does not allow that.

Another certainty is that for a long while salaries will trend down. Because machines will displace people faster than those people can move around. Without a support structure, we risk people averaging less than what they need to survive, for a looong while.

Besides, labor that comes with personal realization is rare even now, with plenty of jobs around. If we want people to have personal realization we must set things so that those people don't need their salary to live. At least not every month.
Can you point out where they are asking for money?
> check the level at which teachers begin paying for school supplies for their students from their own pockets and then back it off about 10%.

Surely "add on about 10%"?
Oh the smell of the Gary Works. It is rough.
There will be early adopters who take on this new tech and show the rest of us the possibilities. Just because someone reads HN doesn't mean they need to jump on the band wagon
No... What I'm assuming is that articles posted on Hacker News should be "news" for "hackers". This assumption is based on my interpretation of the name of the site.

If we are just going to post random short stories or things that hackers (as generic people) find interesting, you might as well post anything - cat pictures, the weather, political things.

If that's the approach people are going to take when they post things here, it would cease to be a useful site that I would wish to frequent.
There's always the option to enable the headlights in such a case. LEDs switch on way faster than incandescent bulbs. And if they're needed at all - a camera has way more flexibility in brightness input range than a human eye.

A car like a Tesla has also highest-quality maps and GPS sensors - these alone are way better than what you get in your smartphone and are enough to keep the car from going over the cliff.
Automation doesn't benefit the people when profits flow toward landlords and business owners.
Earning a lot of money is a pretty damn good proxy for contributing to society. At the very least these people pay some taxes instead of being a drain on society.
rofl, well played :)
I wish more companies could just work on refining their products. It seems that many new products are no better than their predecessors, and in some cases they seem worse as companies strive to differentiate themselves at the cost of functionality.

I like the sound of a new ThinkPad.
WeChat is integral to Chinese culture right now. If you go to China, there are a lot of businesses that only use WeChat Pay and nothing else. WeChat isn't losing appeal, rather, it's essential to living in China.
Why not initiate a share buy back, continue to trim the fat and go private? A return to their roots is necessary rather than trying to balance the share holder value of their B Corp status.
Well said. I will now try to look from the perspective of a business owner, that has automated everything and doesn't need employees anymore. Let's look at the extreme case, where suddenly (e.g. in 10 years) all business in the world is 100% automated and owned by a handful of people and there is no UBI for the rest. As you rightly pointed out, a kind of revolt is to be expected, which however would be suppressed by the 100% automated police, which would place those poor rebels in a 100% automated jail or just get rid of them in some other 100% automated way. In the end all that's gonna remain is the handful of businessman, who only produce and trade goods between themselves. The amount of goods produced and traded will decrease drastically, which will be detrimental to the government (tax income), which by that time will probably be 100% automated as well. At this point in time, an optimist would inevitably notice that carbon footprint and pollution will also be drastically reduced. However, as business usually goes, those handful of businesses will compete with each other until there is eventually only one business left. There would inevitably be a moment of immense happiness and satisfaction for the one and undisputed winner of this game, but then life will just become boring. The guy will wander around, discuss this with his 100% automated personal assistant, think about it, maybe meditate a bit and would eventually decide look for fun at some other place (e.g. Mars). However, there will still remain some sneaky feeling in the back of his head, asking whether UBI would have actually been a better idea in the first place.
Yes I agree, to a first approximation that's true. Dave Crossland (another computer programmer who works with typography) has said similar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPObPbk90I, http://understandinglimited.com/2008/07/24/why-metafont-didn..., https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93crossland.pdf, https://speakerdeck.com/davelab6/anrt-2016-why-didnt-metafon...

This is related to the "thinking with shapes" versus "thinking about shapes" comment.

But looking more closely, there were a few people who made fonts with Metafont: Georgia Tobin, Neenie Billawala etc. made a few, as did a lot of people working with non-Latin scripts: e.g. Frans Velthuis and Charles Wikner made really nice Devanagari fonts. (See "The Many Faces of TeX" for Metafont-fonts as of 1988: https://www.tug.org/tugboat/tb09-2/tb21wujastyk.pdf -- that was probably their peak though.)

Still you're right, no "mainstream" type designers switched over.
That's exactly what I was going to say - the "hand drawn" diagram on the right is better looking, but the left hand is far more accessible and arguably have more utility.

That said, this is a really cool demo.
Please don't forget about Luerl: Lua has GREAT support inside the BEAM VM ecosystem https://github.com/rvirding/luerl
In any population, there are sub-populations with higher and lower fertility.

Over time, because of differential reproduction, these sub-populations will eventually come to dominate, and form the majority of the whole population.

At that point, overall population increase begins and accelerates indefinitely until it hits a Malthusian wall of scarcity.

This process is the same regardless of what distinguishes the higher-fertility subgroups. It could be religion, or genes, or culture, or any combination of these. In any case, those characteristics will eventually dominate.

So one way or another, we will overpopulate and be forced to stop, unless we stop the process of high-fertility subgroup domination using some sort of long-term planning. In the end the only permanent solution may be some fixed-proportion guided reproduction regime, or perhaps a fixed genome mix that we maintain at all times. No natural gene recombination may be allowed, no natural mutations may be allowed to persist.

The current reprieve from this Malthusian tautology is the temporary result of the Industrial revolution and associated cultural shifts colliding with old-time cultural constructs. It couldn't last more than a century or so. Already, differential fertility of massive and obvious. Fertility of very conservative people is 2.35, of the most liberal it is 1.6. Subgroups like Amish, orthodox Jews, and conservative Muslims, and low-IQ people are rapidly growing in the population.

The Amish population doubles every 20-25 years; a simple calculation reveals they'll be hundreds of millions of people within a couple centuries, and billions a couple decades after that. They will grow until something stops their reproduction. The only question is what that something will be.

Evolution will win out in the end. Life finds a way. And it has all the time in the universe to do so.
That's not true at all, in the narrative of the first trial the author makes it very clear that Uber did not deny that the trip or theft happened:

"The one good thing that he did was he did not deny the contents or existence of my backpack."

"One point the Uber rep gave was that I should have heard the car driving away and chased after him."

"The Uber representative said that their drivers are independent contractors and as such, they are not responsible for making sure that they respond to any phone calls, and actually had zero control over what they do."

"Uber said that the driver had a good standing, but was very evasive when asked if he had taken any more trips that night. The Clerk made him answer that there was only one more ride given. This alluded to the possibility that the other passenger could have taken the bag from the backseat."
http://www.asciidraw.com/#Draw

^This is what I use to generate the boxes and other useful shapes & then put that into shakydraw.
Let's note that Elixir is already compatible with it. Phoenix/Elixir, I feel, is the future of web apps.
The bird population is mostly decimated by urban and agricultural development. What little left is subjected to other dangers - most damage is during the most vulnerable stage of egg - the nests are raided for eggs by rats and people (wild bird eggs is a delicacy for many and one such egg gatherer can collect all eggs from a small city park in one lazy afternoon). Cats come on the stage in 2 roles, both are beneficial for bird population - controlling rat population and eating ill birds. Anecdotally, my grandmother's farm (as well as the farms around) had very bustling population of small birds nesting in/on the house/barns as well as multiple semi-feral farm cats roaming everywhere. And there were periodically piles of bird feathers&bones found in the attic of the main house where the cats had their den. There were never a rat or mouse anywhere on the developed part of the farm while i frequently saw those cats carrying a mouse in their mouth back from the hunt out in the fields.
You're not making a meaningful argument.

If you want to pay market rates for labor, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. You are more than welcome to pay $30+ an hour for babysitting. You'll find people tripping over themselves to take your job.

Everybody wants immigrants to be paid more until it's you that has to pay them. Then you'll find you're just as price conscious as everybody else.

The truth here is that this is a really hard problem. Nobody likes the externalization of costs onto the disenfranchised. But once price expectations are set, the expectation that they're always going to go down, that you're going to get more for less, is also set. That's just how markets and human nature work.

You can make an individual decision to pay more for a particular class of good, but on the whole the entire market is focused on delivering more for less, and even if you hang out your shingle and deliver more for more, you will always have a niche clientele because if it were more than niche, then your model wouldn't be profitable anymore. Someone else is going to offer your product for less, and they will eat your market share.
Nice that it's open and shared, but kinda weird that they are storing what is essentially tabular data in code. Looks to me like it would be much more readable if the data were in csv files, and just the graph generating code were in, well, code.
That's according to the 15th-century strict definition by the English that "ale" include no hops or other additives. This probably had to do with an early interpretation of hops as bad for you, since it made people tired or sleepy. Modern definitions make "beer" a general category that includes both ale and lager, and allow for either ales or lagers to include hops or not, just like they can be either top- or bottom-fermenting (though they usually stick to their respective category's defaults)

The fact is that different yeasts growing at different temperatures for different amounts of time with different additives could have resulted in vastly different beers, and while we have an idea what a more likely production method could be, it doesn't discount the idea that brewers could have experimented for hundreds of years and developed different styles. So we really don't know for sure what ancient beer tasted like.
But are they losing money on every ride? I thought the whole point of subsidizing rides was(as OP comments pointed out) to raise demand, both for drivers and riders, they first entice both ways with the promise of lower rates and higher payoffs, then slowly increase their cut of the pie against the driver's payoff and increase the rates on riders.

I'm not saying this will ever offset their increasing losses, but that is what always seemed the long term goal of monopoly.
"tetrahedral beings were flown both unmanned and manned during a five year period from 1907 until 1912" So, according to the article they did carry people.

An important consideration is these kites where lighter per lifting area so they needed less wind and would also fall slower without wind making them somewhat safer. The added redundancy is also an important consideration.

PS: It's actually fairly easy to build a kite that can lift a person in a strong wind as even a simple parachute will work. see: parasailing which can work at even 15mph. The problem is finding a design that fails safely.
From what I have read: Large businesses routinely do this to small businesses. It is standard operating procedure.

If you have a small business, you need to be very leery of having a large customer.
The Poster Child of Android Enthusiasts, OnePlus Is Losing Its Charm
> The vast majority of people have little idea of Uber's issues and if they do have some idea, they don't care. I'm not saying that's how everyone is. Just most people. Especially outside of circles like HN.

The drivers certainly care.
Want to Know What Orange’s New LPWAN Strategy Is?
> I bet if you are ever on the receiving end of a false accusation you will be singing a different tune.

I don't know, I could say the same about women and men who show up to work and just want to do their jobs without coworkers trying to grope them, make lewd comments, withhold promotions or offer interesting work only in exchange for sexual favors. That seems pretty unfair too and we hear about that happening far more often than we hear about people being unjustly accused.

I'm a rich white guy, if someone makes a false accusation against me and I have to leave a company, tough luck; I'll be OK.

Obviously I would prefer if people do not make false accusations, and a company should try in the event of any allegation to determine whether it has a factual basis. But if it's a he said she said situation I am going to side with the accuser.

The wild thing is that the situation you are describing happens literally weekly in tech - prominent women do shout about the unfairness of it all, about reporting harassment and having nothing happen, or being forced out of companies after reporting. Many women choose to leave.
Show HN: sshpubkey – easy, free storage of your SSH public keys
"Many Businesses Are More Viable When They Can Pay Employees Peanuts"

Looking forward to more insightful articles from Bloomberg.
Open Sourced is definitely different than defunct...
Quick Guide to Python Plotting for Exploratory Data Analysis
Then wouldn't you end up with a class of economists who are in a revolving door situation with financial institutions (who stand to benefit from networking with those controlling the purse strings), the same way we now have politicians converting to lobbyists (who benefit from networking with those controlling the political decision making)?