skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Double-ended deals are legal in some US states e.g. California, and they are indeed an opportunity for breach of fiduciary duty. The way it works is that a crooked agent would get the seller to sign a listing contract that stipulates 3% to whatever agent represents the buyer irrespective of who that agent was working for. Then present only double-ended offers, or lowball outside offers to the seller -- hiding any higher offers that came through buyer's agents. And naive sellers have been defrauded this way.

The seller's defense is simple: Refuse to sign any listing contract that stipulates more than a 1% commission to a buyer's agent that is in any financial way affiliated with the listing agent's office. 1% being roughly in line with the actual effort required from the listing agent to deal with buyer-side coordination as well.

Such a stipulation doesn't quite close the door on collusion through favor trading, among agents in the local old-boy-and-girl network. But it's enough to shield you the seller from the grosser frauds out there.
> They rotate which one is reliable to create more consumer confusion and trick you into buying major appliances more frequently.

Do you have a source for this? It may well be true, but to my ear it sounds like one of those "everybody knows..." conspiracy theories.
Erm, James Motherflipping McGill.
Understanding and Optimizing Async Low-Precision Stochastic Gradient Descent [pdf]
Ah, ~free. I guess I needed Satoshi to explain...
I'm not super familiar with this, but it seems like the question is what is "full-system" in this case if each application is sandboxed with its own embedded kernel? I mean there's no shell, ostensibly all other applications and system functions are bundled similarly, right?
It's frustrating. A huge number of top grads move to the US when they graduate for 30-50% higher pay, before exchange rate. Even Amazon will offer you 50% more to move to the US vs. Toronto.
Charge more. At least try just charging $50 for one month and see how that impacts your revenue. Reach out to your users, ask them what they want, see if any of them are in "I have lots of money" niches and see of any of the Ines with lots of money will pay $LOTS for a feature you'd be happy to do.

But please try charging more.
I have the same experience, on Visual Studio for Mac. I was debugging some C# code with an infinite loop the other day, and it locked up the debugger too! Every time. No way to pause and step through the program, so I had to rely on the OS crash log to figure out what was going wrong.
And do we have the resources on two planets to provide everyone with everything they desire? Or ten, or a hundred?

If you know what the bound is on the resources needed to satisfy people's desires, and that's a finite number of planets greater than one, sure. But if you don't have a bound, it's going to be far more effective to adjust people's desires. (And if you do have a bound, and it's slightly greater than one, it may still be more efficient to adjust people's desires to get it to less than one than to expend the engineering work needed to build a multi-planet civilization.)
Ikea also has a 5 year warranty on their electrical appliances.
To pick out one interesting point from that article:

> I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. ... That's Gutenberg’s thing? A bunch of stamps?

Gutenberg's genius was figuring out that while it took a long time to cast and to set up the stamps - probably longer than just writing the page - he'd Automated his process and could print At Scale. (His other major contribution was a good screw press, and, more importantly, the metalurgy and a casting system for the letters).
Learning to run 100-mile marathons thanks to the science of self-control
Businesses will never agree to not having Google Analytics, as pointless as most of those metrics are.
>Or just give up on them or the entire music industry.

Well to be fair, that's pretty easy these days since there's no good music being released any more from the big labels.
Modularity does have a price; that is fairly trivial. But your original statement was much stronger.

The Fairphone's specs are deliberately not top-of-the-line in order to give users better battery life. This is working spectacularly well as evidenced by the fact that my Fairphone 2 has twice the battery life than any of my iPhones ever had. That and repairability is worth much more to me personally than the possibility to submerge the phone in water. After all it's a phone not diving gear. To each their own, but no need to make overblown statements.
You may not even need backup codes. Just save a copy of the google authenticator setup QR code. It's just email/key, when decoded.
How to Get Old Brains to Think Like Young Ones
Thanks! I definitely put in a l to of time making sure it picked the right moods.
i don't really see web applications ever being good mobile applications.

to start with, jit compiling applications on a energy-constrained device is straight stupid. you should compile the application for me on some system that isn't already struggling to make it though to day on a single charge. wasm might help some, but pls don't make my mobile do more work than it has to.

#p2p applications often need special capabilities or native libraries to work well (or at all). the web offers some weak apis for this, but really isn't up to par with what i would be interested in using (or building on). again wasm might help here, only time will tell.

finally, web standards move very slowly and really don't exist as a disruptive force. if you need buy-in from all of the major vendors to push new/interesting features through, you aren't going to get much unless it favors them somehow.
I believe if GNU/ Linux hadn't happened, we would still be working on Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI, Tru64, ....

And eventually some guys would be playing with a BSD variant.
Maybe because there is no "mobile web"? I mean, there's the Web. There's the mess that smartphones make of it. And there's the mess that devs make designing for smartphones. But that's not a problem with the Web.
MS is trying to fix the driver situation with their "precision touchpad" initiative: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cu...
The InfluxDB Storage Engine Documentation
I've found that I generally regret doing this kind of thing to the extent that you need to do it to make a meaningful difference. The problem is that all this stuff comes at a cost -- my source code is no longer structured in a semantically meaningful way.

The SICP quote comes to mind here: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." I greatly prefer to have my code organized in a sensible way. I want to know that "here is where the FooWidget code is".

It's not the end of the world, and people can adjust, but part of what I hate about working on just about anyone's Java code is this constant mental assault of "no, you need to be in the FooWidgetFactoryImpl file to find that code". Just let me have "customer.cpp" or whatever, and I'll live with grabbing coffee during the build.

Admittedly, I don't work on truly large applications. I can imagine priorities change when builds take two hours instead of the 15 minutes I might have to live with.
Elon Musk leads America more than Donald Trump does, trust me. Don't get discouraged because Donny has become President. They hardly do anything interesting.
Designing and building a web app from scratch: a case study
Hope without plans is useless. Hope is not a strategy. This is pretty much just prayer, and a grain of sand in the vastness of problems caused by climate change. Nothing to do with solving permafrost thawing, nothing do with solving the heat shock created by extreme climates, no solutions for ocean acidification.
That's appropriate in 'right to work' states (which is most of them): you can stand up in a meeting & announce "I quit" (or hear "you're fired"), and that's sufficient notification to end your employment. In other states and countries, usually there is a notification period written into your contract which stipulates how much warning you must give the other party before terminating the contract (rule of thumb is 2 weeks + one week per year of employment).
Indeed, I was misinformed. The ratio is much lower than I thought. I think my point still holds, though.
The primary argument in favor of SPAs is that otherwise the entire page and every resource on it has to be reloaded every time the user navigates, and the resulting user experience is vastly inferior to that of an SPA (or native app), especially for users on low-end devices and/or high-latency connections.
Looking at the examples provided, you still need to implement your own dashboard widgets by hand using HTML/Polymer (outside of simple libraries with native support like Bokeh), which is the actual time-consuming part of making dashboards that working with Jupyter doesn't mitigate.

That said, the use case of sharing dashboards is interesting, albeit not a new feature relative to existing solutions like Tableau/Looker.
I really wonder how valuable would augmented intelligence be , when AI will be so much smarter.

If it would be the same as physical strength today,maybe most people won't bother with that too much, and instead focus on other things,maybe more core to feeling well.

One of those things could be the experiences meditation practices talking about, enlightenment etc, and it seems that we won't need neuron level sensing to do that, but something more at the affordable fmri level or maybe eeg+localization, and those seem to be here much before intelligence augemntation.

So I wonder if we'll ever see intelligence augmentation.
Amazon Dash is a one-button solution, if he can't press buttons yet you just need to hack it so another action triggers the "button press" event.
I think they mean in order to actually make a profit it needs to be running nearly endlessly.
Self-sufficiency is rife with its own inefficiencies.

For example, using Mozarts timeframe and attempting it place it on our current planet leads to a situation where no logical comparison can be made. He is from around 1800, there were around 900 million people at the time. You could grow enough locally to feed the population locally in most places. This is no longer true. Mass transportation of food, water, and resources for survival are currently necessary.

The problem is not capitalism, the problem is people

Pretty much every living creature goes through stages of increased resource availability -> growth -> overshooting population capacity or resource reduction -> population reduction. As we can see, overpopulation of raccoons, antelopes, and alligators isn't caused by capitalism, it is caused by the biological imperative to breed -> consume -> breed -> consume. Furthermore your willingness to blame capitalism blinds you to knowledge and an impartial view of what is occurring. Such as, most first world capitalistic countries are experiencing population stagnation. Japan, US, and western Europe all have decreasing population, until you take immigration into account. Also many non-capitalistic countries have terrible problems with pollution (Russia anyone?), thereby again rendering your premise that capitalism is the problem. Blaming the wrong thing never fixed the problem, whipping boys don't lead to solutions.
Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe OS
Re tangent:
Steven King's "on writing" or
Ray Bradbury's "en in the art of writing"

write 1000 words a day, be crap for decades, eventually you get skilled.
"Secure" sounds like a binary attribute but it's actually not. A formal proof doesn't save you from errors in the specification. At some point you need trust, the amount of trust needed is inversely proportional to the security.
Excellent discussion. I'm not knowledgeable enough in Linux internals to know whether the ring0 versus ring3 criticism is warranted. Is it just a matter of if/when an attacker achieves escalated privileges they will have far more attack surface on ring0?
That's a good idea, and I'd love to have been able to do it on either side. That said, it kinda ducks did someone already employed looking to change jobs.
which is what I said
> Well, no, I am not attempting to sell a template for professional-looking invoices

That sucks, I believe you could literally make tens of dollars doing just that! Before Microsoft corners the market with a free app in their current 17 app business bundle of course.
I think they did. If the point was that easy to miss, then the author needs to rethink their point.
Action at a Distance in Quantum Mechanics
DeepLearning11: 10x Nvidia  GTX 1080 Ti Single Root Deep Learning Server (Part 1)
C++ is a language that's incredibly hard to compile efficiently and incrementally, because it suffers from header file explosion (among other things) and as you mentioned it has no working module system.

C compiles a _lot_ faster than C++, so that's always an option. And as other people have pointed out, you can get C++ code to compile much more quickly by being very disciplined about what features you use and how your code is laid out.

So I agree that if you want to ship something right now all your options have significant downsides. I think software engineers as an industry don't take tooling nearly as seriously as they should. Tools are performance amplifiers and we currently waste a staggering number of manhours working with poorly designed, unreliable, poorly documented and agonizingly slow tools.
24 Romantic Dating Tips a Guy Can Do to Make a Girl Melt Completely
One of the major problems we have is that this amazing carbon sink is being destroyed, there have been quite a few years where slash and burn in rainforests has competed with the burning of fuels as the major source of carbon emissions. We face a major challenge to halt that, but to actually reverse it entirely and aim for a radical recreation and expansion seems ambitious. My understanding was that rainforests take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to develop.
> I think large parts of chrome actually belong into the OS. The network parts, the drawing library (skia), the crypto implementation, the window and tab management, and so on.

The problem is cross-platform support. Depending on the OS is obvious if every OS supported the required features.
> Shouldn't 99% of development be about creating semantic models and let generic clients take care of rendering it properly based on form-factor, context, preferences, etc?

If you're not familiar with the Naked Object's pattern, you may find it interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_objects
It doesn't need to but given that the difficulty is ever increasing if you only mine, say, 1/3rd of the time you're at a disadvantage compared to 24/7 miners.

Now if the price of solar electricity is completely free and bitcoin doesn't crash then mathematically there'll come a point when you'll break even but it might take a long while as the mining rewards keep dwindling as difficulty increases while you spend most of your time not mining. Eventually your miner hardware or solar panels will need maintenance and that will increase your costs.

You'd have to do the math to see how long it'll take you to break even, but something tells me that it won't be nearly as competitive as those server farms using cheap hydroelectricity.
Speaking of W10, there was another annoying W10 bug where if you started typing immediately after using the touchpad there was a random delay. If you care about latency and responsiveness, it makes you want to scream at the people who implement these features.
Can you point to an example where this has been done?
Joel, why do you live your life in a way that does not appease your true desires and concerns? You know that your current job and path is off course. Why are you sticking with it?
> the C++ compiler needs to see full class definitions to, e.g., know the size of an object and its inheritance relationships, we have to put the main meat of every class definition into a header file!

Without knowing anything about modern C++ and its compilers, this seems fixable.

I'm thinking a header compiler "hint" indicating the size of an object. When compiling the full class, you get an error if the number is wrong.
I've finally arrived at a pretty comfortable 2FA setup: A Yubikey Neo for TOTP, so I can get codes on any of my devices (including my smartphone via NFC), and a dedicated dumbphone with a worldwide roaming SIM in it where SMS works (and is dirt cheap to receive) no matter where in the world I am.

I still much prefer TOTP whenever possible as the phone is potentially vulnerable to social engineering against the SIM provider.
1. Psychiatry is not bound to the medical ethic of patient autonomy. Medical doctors cannot lock someone in a cell and forcibly drug them because they have an STI.

2. Psychiatric illnesses are defined based on "fallible subjective judgments". Medical illnesses (pathologies) are defined based on objective biological tests.
>I understand piracy more when it's literally impossible to make a legal purchase of something; I get it. When it's merely a matter of spending less money, I have a lot less sympathy for the copyright infringers.

What if the work is old? Do you think it's wrong to make an unauthorized copy of Shakespeare's works, or Beowulf? So why should I have to pay someone for a copy of, say, a Hitchcock movie like "The Birds"? That movie is over a half-century old now, and if the copyright laws hadn't been changed, it'd have been in the public domain for the last 30 years. So why should I feel guilty if I download a copy of it? Why should I be obligated to spend money to some rights-holder who bought out the rights to a work where everyone involved in its production is now dead?
I am not sure how they thought this would succeed, unless they plan on pivoting into the most distributed umbrella retailer ever.

Umbrellas are too cheap to defend with technology. Something like GPS wouldn't help recover umbrellas in a cost effective way, maybe in some future where GPS receives are a penny apiece, but not today.

The only way I see to deal with the problem of people keeping umbrellas is to bill people who take them. Get their credit card or other payment information and let them know when they spend their quarter, or whatever, on the umbrella that if they don't return by a certain time it they will be charged for it. Then you just accept that you are an online retailer with a storefront of everywhere.

Even then this presumes that somehow the umbrella is unusable without registering, how do you make that happen? I will just presumed they solved that one.
No? You can't find one rational reason for the UK government to want extra cash?
How to Learn React: A Five-Step Plan
> "I disagree with having to research it on your own."

Yes, but you need to have enough of your own curiosity to look into it. Not everyone is curious about it, nor should they need to be, the world would be less interesting if everyone had the same interests. However, it is useful for non-curious people to have some grounding in current events, which is supposed to be the function of the news media, but much of today's news media is utter shite. Take any topic covered by the mainstream media that you know something about and you'll easily find disinformation and lies by omission.
The+Price+of+the+Oculus+Rift+Has+Been+Considerably+Reduced
I don't really like the argument that something is 'secure' because it is not vulnerable in the same ways that an alternative is. I think this is why I like talking about encryption so much. It's possible to mathematically prove the security of encryption algorithms, and all that's really left to pick apart is the implementation, politics and impact.
We don't seem to be deploying it that much, carbon emissions are continuing to rise.
How about "the community is better here than Reddit's default subreddits", then?

Reddit has exactly the same problems as the ones you describe HN has, even in specialty subreddits populated with experts. People always think expertise in one field extends to expertise in others.
Actually, I used to work in health insurance, so I have a bit more insight into this than most, although I've been out of it for a while (10 years or so).

If you look into how the RBRVS are calculated, there is effectively a privately run panel that determines input variables and factors that are used in the RBRVS calculations. At some point, someone has to determine the portion of the calculation that represents "physician value added". While it is true that RBRVS is an alternative system to pure UCR rates, I can assure you that UCR rates still play a major role in many health insurance lines of business and calculations.

By the way, RBRVS aren't the only system that organizations have tried to use to figure out how to bill/cost services - there are also DRG groups (diagnostic related groups), ASC groups (ambulatory surgical center) groups and others.

RBRVS were mainly made to try to control physician office costs in Medicare and are used by HMOs that offer Medicare plans. While other HMOs and private insurers use RBRVS, there are a lot of them that still use UCR (calculated internally) as well.

There was a huge problem around 2009/10 with a big company, Ingenix, that was offering a commercial UCR database which was probably of poor data quality - based on surveys of regional prices from doctor's offices. There were lawsuits, etc. over that and many insurers moved away from commercial sources of UCR and instead brought that in-house. Here's a link that talks a little bit about that:
https://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/2009/5/ingenix-after...

Price transparency could help (if it could be achieved), but there are a lot of for-profit organizations who actively try to keep their strategies internal. Transparency might not be enough without pricing controls, but exercising control would be extremely difficult for legal/political/profit motive reasons as well. For that matter, coming up with singular pricing systems that govern controls at scale is incredibly difficult.
D is a language where you can have both. C++ architected correctly can get much closer though. Much larger compilation units are a start. After that, realizing that modularity comes from data formats and protocols means you can start to think about minimal coupling between pieces. I think dynamic libraries for development are very under utilized.
Yes, security patches are a different story and they apply to smartphones but also routers, smart TVs, internet enabled home automation etc.
We basically already have intelligence augmentation; it's just in the form of computers and smartphones.

Interestingly, despite widespread adoption of both, there's still some people "smarter" (i.e. better at certain tasks) than others because they can better apply the tools available.
If the employer doesn’t pay health, then salaries should be much higher than the US. Salaries in the US are exclusives of health benefits. So an SV company paying $140k is paying that in addition to health benefits. A Canadian company is paying $60k AND they don’t have the additional expensive of health. Then on top of that low salary, the employee has to pay taxes which obstensiby funds their health care.

Perhaps it’s worker protection that makes salaries lower in Canada? If it’s harder to fire people, that cost gets spread across all salaries to reflect the risk of having an employee you can’t easily fire.

Canadaians make far less than Americans even after accounting for the “benefits.”

I once saw a company looking to hire a senior rails developer at $25 CAD per hour. Insanity. I think it was even for a Vancouver company.