skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, I should clarify. Their are many layers of 'responders', their maybe just one, your call was routed to the local police. It may have been routed to call center in that area, who in turn broker the call, etc.

Imagine a situation where your traveling down an interstate out in the boonies. Theirs a wreck. You call 911 from your cell. The responder will receive an approximation of your location, likely the closet cell tower. From that, and before being able to send a responder, they must determine WHO to call based on your location. Just because your closer to town B than town A doesn't mean town B gets the call. Town B may forward your call to town A. Then, you have to determine where to dispatch too. It's doubtful you know the closest mile marker. Only your direction of travel, and the last area that you can remember.

It's strictly a best effort.
> I guess I should start a payday loans company marketed in such a way that using it doesn't offend the class sensibilities and self-image of well-off millennials and say I'm doing something "new".

https://www.lendup.com/
You're skipping the whole damn point: physical access was required.

At that point, there ain't shit you can do to stop an attacker with software based security. A human being, sitting in front of the hardware, is going to win.

Also, it's not that easy to damage these things. There certainly are cases where you can add wear and tear, decrease life span, and if the weather is cooperating, cause catastrophic failure. But it's certainly not a sure thing, and in most of the failure modes they outlined, you'd have plenty of time to shut them down and get a tech on site.

A little bit of dynamite (or any sort of improvised explosive) is cheap, readily available, and requires the same physical access, only it happens to be a far more reliable way to cause failure...
And they still can with heliostats and fibre optic cables :-)
I point out yet again, to the Yahoo Email debacle.
Google it please.
I think Sebastian is introducing an orthogonal perspective, which has nothing to do with morals. The theoretical ideal is that an insurance company nets zero profit while operating at maximal efficiency. Introducing a third-party (investors) that benefit from extracting revenue is a form of overhead that decreases that potential efficiency. This isn't all bad though. Likely, if it were not for the investors, the company would never exist, so they should have rights to a piece of the pie. Unfortunately, the trade-off introduced is conflict of interest.

Investors reward behaviors that maximize revenues be it through cost-cutting, premium hikes, or benefit reductions (or potentially the opposite assuming sales increase enough.) Granted, some of the more negative actions might cause customers to move from one provider to the next because of free markets and whatnot, and theoretically, the market should reward the company that provides the best balance for customers... except that almost all insurance companies are owned by investors, and over the long run, these investors incentivized to maximize revenue in prisoner's-dilemma-like fashion.[0]

So... I'd argue introducing investors over the short term is a fantastic idea, but at some point, it's probably wisest give them a heap of profits, and turn off the tap. Otherwise, the company will turn into yet another publicly-traded monstrosity with a mechanical conscience.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
Portacle is a great project. My concern with it as a recommendation is that Lispbox was a great project too, until it wasn't...or rather that the enthusiasm of the maintainers of easy to use Common Lisp projects seems likely to be shorter lived than Common Lisp (though perhaps Github may make this less a potential problem). The fact that people get paid to improve and maintain the Racket ecosystem as part of their day jobs in academia is one of the reasons I recommend it for 'how should I start exploring Lisp' (versus learning Common Lisp).

https://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/
Interesting that you mention that. I modeled traffic. Give me a two way radio, a dozen cars, and time to monitor the traffic and I can probably bring most any large urban area's traffic throughput to a crawl.
You're right about the Japanese constitution being written by the Allies. Without Allies defeating Japan, though, they'd have taken over large parts of Asia and could very well be more prosperous / free than they are now. I don't think Imperial Japan was any less economically free than Gilded Age Europe, but I'd have to look it up.

I'm curious how various atrocities committed by Anglo-Saxon nations fit into your world view where they are the most free and just. Britain brutally colonized and oppressed many other countries and cultures such as India, large parts of Africa, and even America. Do their colonies not count? America and Great Britain had slavery for generations. Germany, who wrote the constitution you just referenced (despite them not exactly being Anglo-Saxon? I'm not sure) did that whole Holocaust thing 15 years after it was written, not sure if you've ever read about that in your books.

You seem really set on Anglo-Saxonism being the superior culture and model for the rest of the world. That's really creepy, since there isn't much terribly unique to that culture except whiteness? I'm white and I don't feel any real connection to the people who wrote The Magna Carta versus Marx or Eastern philosophers. I feel like most people act pretty much the same way and organize themselves in the same way, when prosperity permits. Ideology seems to flow pretty freely, and Democracy was invented thousands of years ago.

Again, it seems to me that freedom has more to do with prosperity and prosperity has more to do with war and domination of other nations. Anglo-Saxon nations frequently interfere with Eastern freedoms for economic gains, see the aforementioned CIA coup in Iran or the Opium Wars in China. I can point to a lot more instances of the West outright crushing the freedoms of other cultures / nations than helping.
For what it's worth, when we bought from Wayfair it took us 9 weeks to get our couch after paying for express shipping, and it looks OK but it's a really crappy couch. Not saying Wayfair is a bad option, just there's a reason why it's so inexpensive.

At a certain point it makes sense to pay for convenience. It may not be for everyone (honestly it's not for me), but that doesn't mean there's no market.
You are correct! Sorry for the bad info.
Maybe to address the pricing concerns you could make it more like car leasing deals that often allow to buy the leased car after the contract is over? You could rent furniture but with an option to buy at any time and terminate the monthly payments.
Unless by "political orthodoxy", you mean the KMT military dictatorship in power before Taiwan became a democracy, your comment is simply false. You will not find any elected politician on the island claiming that Taiwan is a part of China.

The political views of the mainland soldiers who invaded Taiwan during the 50s and the views of the people of Taiwan who were at their mercy weren't the same, even when dictatorship made it impossible to speak freely. Many had to acquiesce to the system to get by and some did for decades. A prime example would be the first Taiwanese native to succeed in the KMT. After decades of doing the party's bidding, he made it to the very top and destroyed the dictatorship from the inside by allowing opposing parties to form, participate in elections and ultimately win.
It seems like for health insurance at least, the problem of trying to optimize insurance premiums based on any risk factor you're legally allowed to discriminate on is a problem that just sort of goes away in a medicare-for-all style single-payer insurance system. Everyone pays taxes and receives health care services -- you just have to make sure your taxes rate is set properly to cover the costs incurred.

(I think governments are sometimes unfairly criticized for inefficiency because they incur higher costs simply by not having the option to cherry-pick their customers the way private companies usually can. There are of course cases where the criticism is justified.)
Exactly this!

I think I fall mostly into your #2. I have been self employed for 15 years and for the past year have been volunteering at my sons middle school 1 hour per week. I am not retired but have financial stability from my own business.

Your points about dealing with the administration are so true. It is beyond frustrating. I understand their hands are tied on certain things because they have guidelines, etc. to follow but it really has made me realize I would never consider teaching for a living in the current education system. Not only because the pay is low but because of all of the political crap you have to deal with. I have been approaching it as don't ask first and do things the way I want until they tell me no. It has caused friction with the administration but I don't really care because the kids are getting so much from it and the classes always book up super fast with a waiting list. I am doing this for free so what is the worst they can do? Cut me off? That would a disservice to the kids not to me.

Your #1 point is what I see the most and some of what is being taught or lack there of is mind blowing.
Been using Dvorak since college. I did lose the ability to use a standard keyboard for a bit but gained it back. (The switching process is actually quite fascinating from a cognitive POV...there was a point where I would type half a word in Dvorak and half in Qwerty, resulting in nonsense, and then a later period when the keyboard layout I would type in was conditioned by which app was on the screen.) I'd say the speed boost is about 10-15% and it helps quite a bit for RSI, but it was a good year or two before I was back up to my previous Qwerty speeds and fluent on both keyboards, so it takes a while to recoup your investment. A decade and a half later I can say it was worthwhile, but don't expect miracles.
You might be interested in something like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma which has an upfront pricing page for their surgery procedures: https://surgerycenterok.com/pricing/

Even though the ycombinator blog post is discussing innovation etc with regard to insurance, I like the idea of innovation on the side of service providers. And it is somewhat sad that a list of prices is innovative.
I wonder how they are addressing the lack of standardization of NFC protocols, which has essentially prevented NFC from taking off..
I don't think he really even read the article...
NYT newsroom to walk out
I'd hate to be the Gang of Four, especially since they wrote their book 20 years ago. Since then numerous people (including myself) have discussed how to evolve some of their ideas given today's landscape.

My position is many ideas are still valid in their book, but they are less novel today and are often implemented with simpler tools. I'm sure the Gang would concur.

Other ideas may be less valid over time and I'd be surprised if the team didn't grow in their perspective.
Implementing a Key-Value Store
> the three basic areas of active literacy in modern society are writing, coding, and video production.

Uhm... source? Why writing, coding, and video production and not writing, coding, and photography? Or podcasting? It's unclear whether you randomly made this up on the spot, or if you're actually quoting academic taxonomies.

FWIW, Wikipedia says:

"Literacy is traditionally understood as the ability to read, write, and use arithmetic. The modern term's meaning has been expanded to include the ability to use language, numbers, images, computers, and other basic means to understand, communicate, gain useful knowledge and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture. The concept of literacy is expanding in OECD countries to include skills to access knowledge through technology and ability to assess complex contexts."

Video production does not seem to have a prominent position, and while computers/technology are brought up, coding is not.
> It was complicated from the start.

No it wasn't. It's only "complicated" from a certain very specific and constrained POV, which you seem to have adopted wholesale and now assume as the only valid reality.

Mutability is not just how "the metal" works, it's also how the rest of the world works. If I eat a banana, the contents of my stomach (and by extension I) change. You don't get a new me that's no longer hungry + the old me that hasn't changed. If I put gas in my car's tank, the car changes. I don't get a new car. Etc.

You are also conflating immutability with atomic updates, as far as I can tell.
You heard it here first, non-Westeners. ZERO
An example from the article, Sheryl Sandberg, has hardly become a thought leader by trying to become one, there's nothing about the achievement that requires an intentional pursuit.
Then there's the idea that they'll go totally internet based, allowing forwarding or conferencing in multiple psaps, translators, etc. Somehow, they're supposed to secure all this, but I'm doubtful. It'd be one of the largest secure federated networks in the world I think. And they aren't exactly tech savvy. Doing one of the first wide-scale VoIP 911 services, we had psaps call us to say they wouldn't take phone calls from VoIP users, even on their landlines, because "they might send us viruses".

NENA folks also wanted the FCC to mandate an IP location system to be available on every Internet connection - what a privacy mess that'd be, when any app with IP access could get your exact location down to the apt number.

I trie experimenting with what I named "Advanced 911". For calls to places where we couldn't deliver location info, we'd prompt the answer to press a key to have us speak the info. But getting adoption for that was super difficult.

Also, the stress involved in those jobs, wow. I thought I could handle stuff, but auditing problem calls where people were dying, panicking, and didn't know where they were - that's traumatic. Also made me really dislike how cavalier 911 is handled by the telecos.
Memo: An elastic and resilient key-value store
Open Sourcing Iris and Oncall – incident escalation and reliable messaging
If properly backed up digital records are even more resilient, and it's not like this is a new concept. Banks are incredibly resilient when it comes to backups, for example. As are most of the major tech companies. Sure other institutions like hospitals and some underfunded government agencies might need to catch up, but once the will is there the technology is just waiting to be implemented.

Not to mention the insecure institutions are insecure in different ways. Whatever methods used to take down one hospital is unlikely to work on the next, although standardized National Healthcare systems like the NHS might be more vulnerable to such things.

Opening a priority bug is an entirely different animal than responding to an active attack. If something was able to shut down AWS, Google, a bunch of hospitals, or any other critical service, it gets immediate attention and reaction. Humans become incredibly productive once shit hits the fan.
The ransomware can present the key fingerprint for example.

But even without it, there are so many options, e.g. timestamp signed message on the blockchain before the release. After just one confirmed message you don't care about pretenders because people can check if the signature matches with the previous message.
That would explain how Uber would mitigate some of the resultant competition, not why it would eliminate their "only need one app" advantage.
Having done TDD mostly full-time for well over a decade, I have to agree, and it hits home with some past experiences.

You can end up with fully tested, TDD'd code, that is not well-designed - i.e. unnecessarily coupled, and not cohesive. Cohesion and coupling are the basis of most everything in good software design - e.g. all the letters in SOLID boil down to those two things.

The premise of TDD is that it's supposed to make that too painful to do to a damaging extent. But, if you keep ignoring the pain, perhaps in the name of a "spike" solution, or because you just don't have the experience or background to know what good design is, you will end up with a tested mess of spaghetti.

And that's even harder to untangle and refactor than untested code, because you have to figure out which tests are useful, useless, or missing. That just slows you down as you work towards a better design.

In these situations, scrapping the whole module, including tests, and starting over, is sometimes faster in the long run that trying to refactor incrementally with the safety net of existing tests (another of the main values of TDD).

-- Chad

(edit: typo)
Can Microbes Encourage Altruism?
Yeah I could google it, but its common practice to spell out an acronym the first time you use it.
Let's take this example: Kernel update with security fix gets pushed out, said fix ended up causing issues with a network card or some other component and causes panics. Can a sysadmin revert to previous kernel revision? Sure. Should they have to do so, submit a bug and pray someone pays attention to it? I don't think that's a great idea.

Replacing hardware isn't always a solution, especially when it comes to specialized setups for databases, file storage, etc. Knowing your vendor has kernel engineers on staff that can tear through a kernel dump and get you a hotfix ASAP to test is important.

Startups may not care, smaller companies may not, but we're a medical billing company that has over 1,000 employees that need systems to be up - if they're down not only has work stopped but we're either paying employees for doing nothing or having to send them home unpaid (which makes THEM unhappy). Facebook having servers randomly kernel panicing affects their engineering team and causes small hiccups to their users (who don't pay them a dime), we have the productivity of our own employees and their livelihoods riding on the line.
NYT copy desk to top editors: ‘You have turned your backs on us’ – Poynter
I think my main point/question is really what is the concrete systematic difference between a "faux state" (as you refer to Hong Kong) and an occupied territory?

Of course your points about the economic differences are correct. But are you saying that you agree that the current political situations aren't that different, that it's just the economic situation that's different?

And wow, as you mention, the Hong Kong/China GDP Per capita difference is approximately 5x. Israelis have 12x the Palestinian GDP Per capita[1].

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?ie=UTF-8&rct=j#q=west+bank+gdp+...
Ask HN: How did you architect your web application that uses machine learning?
I have recently begun incorporating machine learning to tune some parameters which are used in a web application. I am quite new to working with machine learning but it looks like the ML portion of this project will grow substantially. Currently I write small ML scripts using python and just manually update the Ruby on Rails application with the results.

How have you architected your application that incorporates machine learning?
Really cool idea. How is it making calls? I imagine there's a cost associated with providing a service that routes calls?
...and in fact this documentation effect is (so far) the only positive effect of static typing that has had at least some scientific validation.
Some diseases are correlated with race. Like, sickle cell anemia.
Even smaller parks in San Francisco, like Buena Vista, have surprisingly large amounts of wildlife despite being in dense areas.

I've seen coyotes and raccoons in my neighborhood. In preserved areas like the Presidio and the Headlands, I've seen Bald Eagles while cycling.
This is so obvious and true that everyone cannot help but overlook it.

What happened to the days when the NSA helped make world class crypto like AES256 in a public forum?
FFS. China has private ownership of property encoded in its constitution. What are you even talking about? Very frustrating to watch these energetic discussions with strongly-held views based on pure nonsense.

It's 2017 guys. You have a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it, please!
What looks good, what looks real, is actually an active area of psychophysics research in high-dynamic range image capture and rendering.

The real world is high dynamic range, but human vision is much more limited, but also spacially variant and adaptive. So we get multiple optimized "snap shots" of a scene rendered in real time and mapped into what our brain considers one scene. Look toward high key high brightness area of a scene, retina gain function clamps down the iris closes and you get properly rendered details in those areas, look toward a tree shaded bench at a rock under that bench and iris opens, gain function increases and again the shadow details are rendered. Cameras are just starting to do this.

But that's capture. It's still HDR. Now you have to re-render all of that if you're going to reproduce it on a lower dynamic range device like a computer display. There aren't that many HDR screens on the market yet but those are also coming, and it means we don't have to do that next stage re-rendering which is a lot more subjective and still actively researched why some renderings look real and others look cartoonish.

And the same would be true for computer generated graphics rather than captures.
Gotcha - thank you for the detailed response.
The elite in Asia give back. They just don't give back parks and gardens.
No one is ignoring it...

The whole freaking article is about companies paying specialists to see how secure their farms are.

My issue is that the article glides past the "physical access" part to focus on the "scary cyber weapons" part.

That's bullshit. If it was a remote exploit from an internet connected machine, sure: that's scary.

This wasn't that.
IMO, the future is likely not individuals in their autonomous cars. It's a ubiquitous autonomous ad-hoc ride sharing network, which will features some of the good parts of trains and buses, and some of the good parts of Taxis or individual cars. Popular routes will likely be populated by lots of large vans and buses of various sizes, all autonomous, and there might be interchange points where you get dropped off for a minute or two before an autonomous car comes to pick you up for the last few miles. Other people might already be in that car and going the same direction, or be waiting for you. Once there's a critical mass of ridership, you can get some really efficient usage of the system, and route capacity as needed.

I did some napkin math on this a while back[1]. It's interesting.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177836
Well, so what if they aren't around in 6 months? Once the furniture is delivered, there's not much risk to the customer after that.
It seems that his only credentials are his hair.
I think kids would better served learning how to solve problems and staying curious.

I had given my niece this board game robot turtles that was post on here several years back. Its a great game, but it really requires a parent to get involved.

I remember I got started back in the mid 80s with writing maze games in BASIC. When I was a little older, I bought all those little electronics books printed on graph paper that they sold at Radio Shack. Then I would make simple circuits and learn to solder.
I'm looking to improve my technical writing if you have any advice!
> How come we're not innovating more on the structure of those companies?

There have been tons of research and it is still ongoing. Just check the "management" department in your library. Companies around the world are permanently trying new ways to organize themselves but you don't get as many "we tried $foo, it fails" blog posts you get from the IT scene, where post mortems for even the most trivial failures are currently en vogue. But if you ask any manager s/he will volunteer stories, usually quite happy to be asked an abstract question in their area of expertise.