skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regulations can be used appropriately to stop a race to the bottom, and I think airline seats are a good example.

When credit card companies started tweaking terms and conditions to make their cards more and more hostile to consumers, it's hard to be the company that still offers the "right" terms (e.g. Payments above the minimum apply to the highest interest balances first) when most consumers don't even understand what I just wrote.

Similar with airline shopping, seat pitch just isn't visible enough, and even if it was right there next to the price, do most shoppers understand what 28" pitch really means?

A perfectly functioning free market relies on perfect information available to the consumer. Today, we get a price and (usually) a brand name and that's about it. So competition is almost entirely on price.

In cases like these, it benefits everyone to make some regulations setting reasonable ground rules. Freeing airlines from having to compete against 28" seat pitch is like freeing credit card companies from having to compete against predatory terms and conditions.

Yes of course this has an impact on the bottom line. It would marginally increase the cost of tickets the same way the CARD Act made it less profitable to issue cards to certain people, and the same way airbags make cars more expensive.

There are other practices I disdain, like charging extra for a seat assignment or a boarding pass, but those are more visible when buying the ticket and I can more easily avoid it.

I do think if we could get much better and clear labeling on the differences between available seats (pitch, width, recline, power, screen, entertainment, food) it would help a lot. But airline shopping is already very painful, data overload is a real problem.
> Google has this "do no evil" value

Former Google engineer here. There's a subtle but significant semantic difference between "Don't be evil" (the real motto) and "Do no evil" (a confusion between the Hippocratic oath and the Google motto).
Over the past decade I've worked a lot on shedding light on corporate funded politicians and legislation and how that affects the working class.

One of the toughest parts of that is getting folks to understand how the gains in productivity are being taken from them by corporate owners that fund the Democrat and Republican Parties.

I've also worked pretty hard on getting us (the US) out of those mid-east wars with very little effect.

I live in a very rural conservative area and most of my neighbors are great folks but they tend to get a lot of tilted information on TV and the internet. Because I am able to point out these issues in a bi-partisan way they tend to listen and read what I share more than they would a "Libtard" (a term I hear often).

Since 2002 I've also made inexpensive software for small businesses and provide support for it. It's pretty easy to use so I don't get many requests for support. I'm working a new version of that software now.

I've shared a few concepts I've developed. A few years ago I made a lightweight backpacking tent made out of an "SOL Blanket" and showed how a small campfire would warm it up to +80º F in below freezing temps. I didn't invent that concept. "Bushcrafters" did. I just refined it and demonstrated and promoted a more practical way of using it. In the years since I've seen other similar designs come out, some that are made to be used for the homeless and in emergencies.

The thing about this kind of work is that it is usually impossible to measure the reach, but not so to see the effect if you are patient. My theory is if you can shed light on something true and good that light will spread, and seeking credit for how far is vanity.

If a concept is good it's better to get it out in the open than guard it like a secret if you cannot make the general use of the concept a reality. It's better because you will still get to benefit from it coming into existence.

A small example of this is years ago I took a cap off of a dishwashing soap bottle and put it on a disposable water bottle I bought on the way to a bike trail. When I got home I told my wife I was going to make it so I could buy these in the store because at that time no company was doing that. I looked up a company that made bottles and caps and told them what I wanted and it wasn't long before I could buy water and Gatorade with those caps in the store. My wife still thinks I "should have made a million dollars" and tells that story a lot but I know that was never the case. I don't think that made the world a better place, but it demonstrates how one can deliberately change how things are done by shedding some light on an idea.
Yea i think that is a large part of the problem, a kind of variation of the principle agent problem. Either your company forces you to take the cheapest option, so you cannot take into account legroom, or your company doesn't care, and you don't either since it isn't your money, so the airlines can charge ridiculous markups for extra legroom.

Google seems to have a good intermediate policy where you can keep money you save on one trip and use it for upgrades on future travel.
I'm 6", not overweight, and from Europe: seat width and pitch is a big issue for me. Economy seat width is typically an uncomfortable 17-18 inches, and pitch typically a painful 31".

I have to fly long haul in economy with work (who won't pay for anything else), so my choice is either several hours of pain and discomfort, or to pay a large sum to upgrade myself - if the fare is even upgradable. Bring on the regulation!
A company leaving a large market will be outcompeted by a company which doesn't; for companies, ignoring profits kills them. If it's anyone's job to respond to China's government, it's other governments', as they can take losses more easily but still not easily enough to get by without coordinated action (easier for governments than companies since there are fewer governments and new states don't form as quickly as new companies.)
I'm glad we agree on the socioeconomic aspects of homelessness, and I can understand that the smell could be distracting. Are there many programs to help the homeless in SF? From what little I know, I do get the impression that issues surrounding homelessness are becoming a major concern in SF.
Not Worried About Tech Bubble
you mean couple times.

and they didn't forget. they just internalize what that supposed rational actor would count on: that by wining, you get to be the good guy in history's eye.
Sounds like you might be interested in my dumb-jump package: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
There isn't nearly enough real-crash data for something as specific as seat widths, but the FAA gets lots of info about this stuff by simulating evacuation procedures with real people.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
This article misses something I feel is really very important: Kotlin is just Java! Like, granted, I'm probably a better-than-average developer, but I was turning out well-factored, clean, readable, 100% Java-interoperable code in Kotlin in about a day. Over time I've added more Kotlin-specific stuff (like their way nicer-feeling collections APIs) but for real, it's just...Java.

But it's smarter Java. It gets out of your way. If you understand Java, the 1:1 mapping between Kotlin and Java is trivial. I can tell you what the auto-generated Kotlin code from the IntelliJ helpers is gonna look like when you convert Java to Kotlin and it's just...obvious? The only thing I have ever had even the slightest trouble with was how to take a var (which I understood immediately to be a backing field with getter/setter methods under the hood, both because the doc says so and because IDEA says "from getFoo/setFoo" when importing Java so it's an obvious intuitive leap) and apply a Hibernate Validator attribute only to the getter. It was a hole in the docs at the time, but I figured it out: `@get:Something()`. If that's the only thing that gets an experienced but largely out-of-the-game Java developer a little head-scratchy, this should be a slam-dunk type of thing for somebody who writes Java every day.

Maybe it's harder for Android. (I think you should write React Native for Android for basically anything you can--and I have, I released a Google Play app a couple weeks ago that I really should get around to marketing--because while I am down with Kotlin,I also like being able to actually share code everywhere.) But Java-to-Kotlin is a no-brainer, in my book, at literally any Java shop not targeting, like, Java one-dot-ancient.
If the problem is that the data is there but people don't understand it, then you'd see consumers flying a shitty budget airline like Spirit once and then going back to another airline. People will regularly come back to these budget airlines. I really do think that consumers' revealed preferences are just not what most people think they should be.
Air travel has become a commodity. Not that it has to be, but most of the airlines approach it that way. Therefore, and the market parrots this, price is the driving force. "Race to the bottom" comes to mind.

Simultaneously, most Westerns consider air travel a right. It's not a proper holiday unless a plane is involved. I'd be curious to know how much air travel is necessary, and how much is simply a choice. I suspect it's the ladder, though the market certainly acts like it's the former.

Long to short, if it we're THAT bad (over a 3+ hr flight), less people would fly. That's not the case, is it?

p.s. I think when you factor in body size, the seats are even more proportionally small. But that too is often a choice. Moral of the story? Human make bad choices. Not to worry i'll refrain from making a comment about politics :)
Well written and thought out, meta issues such as training are rarely mentioned in comparison pieces but do play an important role in the decision process
It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don't pay for do or don't do. Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water. The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.
I'm curious, why do you say competition doesn't exist?
flights.google.com usually shows you the legroom when you pick the flights (average 30", below average 28", etc).

disclaimer: I work at google but not related to the flights team.
Full Tesla Model 3 2017 Presentation [video]
While the overweight-passenger issue is a real thing, in this case the seat pitch affects people who are taller. 28" (711mm) seat pitch (which includes the thickness of the seat), doesn't leave much room if your femur is longer than that. So all the Dutch and Scandinavian fliers would really suffer on a 4+ hour flight.
I had to fix your URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
Yes, unsupervised learning in a VR environment seems to be paying dividends.
They don't want to rely on China to secure their regime, they know how precarious that position can be.
A reservation can be made by giving Tesla $1000. You can get it back if you decide not to buy. Max two reservations.
The UN is an empty paper tiger, I am afraid. As long as the veto power of China and Russia in the security council stands, there will be no ousting of any dictator, no matter how brutal he acts.

The Russians will continue to veto anything that might endanger their claim to Crimea or their naval base in Syria. The Chinese will continue to veto against anything that might impact North Korea (due to their land border), and also likely against anything that might disrupt their infrastructure and other investments in Africa. The US will veto anything that endangers whatever business interests Trump has or what could endanger Israel (and, IMHO, rightly so).

Also, there are no consequences for failing to adhere with UN resolutions, as the UN does not have an independent standing military force, so as long as you as violating country have one supporter in the SC (it usually is either US, China or Russia), you don't have to fear anything.

What's worse is that the UN is not at all democratic. The representatives are not elected democratically, they are not bound to the will of the people, and there is no proportional voting according to population size.
That paper acknowledges that AWD does provide more traction than 2WD, it just says that drivers can become overconfident as a result of that extra traction.

Their data also shows that for cars, across all types of cars, AWD cars are in fewer overall (though more severe; the focus of the paper) accidents than 2wd cars.

Given my own experience, even considering this paper, I still want an AWD.
If you apply for a job, someone might actually read your code! But most people, especially your users, don't care if the program is written in C, "brainfuck" or Java, they just want something that works and is easy to use.
This reminds me a lot of Swift's early days. Build times, dev stability, learning curve, static analysis (remember the esoteric compile/lint errors...) even reversibility (i.e. Apple had a tool to convert from Obj-C to Swift but not the reverse) were issues that were brought up. If Kotlin hopefully follows Swift's path then these will get ironed out over time.
My local library has a 3d printer accessable to everyone. You just have to pay for filament cost really. It has laptops for borrowing, quiet spaces for coding or studying. I don't know of anywhere else I could casually use a 3d printer and have it printed out to me. Even the local hackerspaces around me require you to get certified or something.
I once got a free "upgrade" to economy plus. They seated me at a bulkhead and (because no under-seat space) required my carry-on go in the bins where I couldn't see whether my company laptop was being stolen.

If instead I could get elbow room and still have something to read, that might be worthwhile.
The review of the basic model might be very different ... or might be similar, I don't know. I was just trying to answer your (perhaps rhetorical) question:

> If autonomous driving is out of the question, what makes Model 3 appealing compared to a Chevy Bolt, Chevy Volt or a plug-in Prius?

The reviewer didn't mention anything about testing autonomous driving features. He raved about the car performance, from a driver perspective. Responsiveness, vibration on the steering wheel, how stable it is, etc. That is, he was looking for a features of a car that needs a driver, not what an autonomous car would provide. Therefore an answer to your question: "If autonomous driving is out of the question, what ..."

Perhaps I misunderstood your question?!?
Crooks Reused Passwords on the Dark Web, So Dutch Police Hijacked Their Accounts
That was my initial idea I proposed as a fix. However I am not really comfortable with it and came to the conclusion I don't think it's a good fix.

Ultimately that makes a pretty bold assumption: That if you have database credentials on a host this allows you to control other people's webapps in some situations. That's not reasonable. I could just be another customer at a webhoster and I don't think it's reasonable to assume that customers are allowed to hack each other.

I think a real additional authentication step for all installations is the right solution.
Are you using Shopify? Drop shipping?
I agree. I think there's a big hump in the middle of people who are like "hmm, this is relevant to me, i'll click it", then 2 long tails of people who click a LOT and people who click rarely or not at all.

On the other hand, there is a not-insignificant number of bot networks and shady clickfarm sites out there. Though, you can usually avoid being taken in by them by not being a cheapskate - quality traffic is more expensive. If you're bidding <$1 CPM for most things, enjoy funding a click farm.
Apple paid Nokia $2B to escape fight over old patents
> America is owed robust news organizations

Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.

However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via "the free market", and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.

It'll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.
I think the advantage is that you end up with much terser programs because you don't have to explicitly declare everything as an array.
The US regime has had nuclear missiles trained on a non-nuclear North Korea for decades, and has openly and seriously threatened to drop dozens of nuclear bombs at once on the populace and salt the land afterward with radioactive cobalt to prevent future human life.[1] Yes, how dare they bluster back, you'd better kill them for the insolence as an example to others.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/09/texts-of-accounts-by-lucas...
If you're listing a bunch of URL patterns and you're not describing your media types, you almost certainly don't have a REST API, so why even call it that? It's an HTTP API. What do you have against calling it that?
From reading through some of the China threads you came upon, I'm not really sure if you are really familiar with the concept of "free".
Kotlin is here to stay, it's a pleasure to code in it. The same way ObjC gave way to Swift and I also enjoy coding in it. They both are the only languages I use today for any development. I don't care about tail-call-whatever, functional-whatever or monad-whatever, I just care about a nice and clean syntax that gets out of my way to get the job done in less time. The rest will be improved by people way more intelligent than me in whom I trust, backed by two of the biggest players in the development world, Google and Apple.
Have you tried it on ice? Or just dry/wet roads? AWD/FWD/RWD all behave very differently on ice/snow, regardless of traction control.
so they just blithely ignore that, got it
I don't necessarily blame the consumer, per se, but I don't think regulations on seating beyond safety are entirely necessary either.

I'm 6'4" and 280lbs- I'd like more length AND width so I pony up the extra $80-150 for whatever version of the economy plus exists on that carrier. I've also found that certain carrier's regular ol' economy are just fine. Delta, Southwest and Alaska routes with the newer generation of plane cabins fit me perfectly adequately. My knees are right up to the seat back in front of me but not IN the seat back in front of me.

I don't bargain shop for my flights at all beside sanity checking the route prices. I'll pretty much do anything to avoid connections, and I refuse to fly United or any budget airline besides Southwest, regardless of price.

I use Alaska as much as possible (live on the west coast), and Delta when I'm going to the east coast or to Europe (they partner with KLM).

I've got status on both so I get all kinds of perks, and the service on Alaska, Delta, and Southwest are about as good as you're going to get in the US (at least once you get some status).

I'll reluctantly fly American if they're the only suitable option for my schedule or are insanely cheaper, but I find that my three first choices generally cover the day sufficiently enough to make it work.

I'm not fond of the SWA cattle call, but I've found their seats to be decently sized, their staff to be human and helpful within their power, and their focus on not nickel and diming is a breathe of fresh air.
I would recommend joining Gigster or TopTal if you can. Both services are in a completely different league to Upwork in all regards — great clients and projects, high-quality work opportunities, money.
I freelance for Gigster, so I know more much more about them than I do about TopTal. The business models the two companies operate are different. From what I understand, TopTal connects the workforce with customers on a long-term basis, and the pay is per hour, while Gigster allows freelancers to take several gigs at any given moment and the pay is typically set according to the scope of work and the dev’s reputation. With some very rare exceptions, all work is remote.
So far, my personal experience with Gigster has been amazing. I have worked on a variety of projects that have really helped my resume shine to shine, I've met lots of cool and friendly people (many of whom are among the best in their field), and I've earned quite decent money in the process.
Many Gigsters have a stable six-figure income. While this may only scratch the surface of what people are paid in the Valley, when you think about combining it with the freedom to live/travel wherever you want — be it in Thailand, Costa Rica or Greece — you get a true perspective of the potential of joining Gigster.
"If I buy a mattress, advertising more mattresses to me doesn't make me more likely to buy them; I bought the thing already."

Actually, it is possible that you might want to buy a mattress again. Consider that you found the new mattress to be more/less firm and are looking to return it and get a different one. I think it is reasonable to show ads for the same thing at least till the end of return window.
Yes. That's why data structures and algorithms are front-and-center at these interviews. They don't actually care about engineering ability. It's all about ego, trivia, and who can fart out product faster.
by your (flawed) logic, US and UK should return all (or 1/3 to be extra fair in your twisted analysis) nukes to Ukraine after the russian invasion.

the more sane interpretation is that they should help them against the party gone rogue on the treaty. otherwise all their other treaties will be assumed to be void by other nations. which is what is happening, and every state in those areas are already siding up with either russia or china, who they fell have more skin in the game to uphold their word later on. dependable terms are better than good terms on those things.
Yes, I actually almost used YAML but tabs only were simpler.

So, you're saying that I could turn it into YAML and then use any YAML parser. That's a really good idea.

I think I can just add a dash character to each line before the last tab character (if any) and I'd have YAML...
What do you do when this software discovers it's rewarding to compete with you for physical space?

The problem with AGI is it'll implicitly have to model the entities it interacts with and that may present two challanges:

1) Developing robust strategies for managing an AGI discovering a greater reward response from defecting than for cooperating with people / developing strategies for managing scenarios in which a quorum of AGIs discover it's rewarding to collude to the detriment of humans / cellular life.

2) The tractability of maintaining one language model per entity across channels.

The actual implementation could be done by plugging a handful of related techniques we've developed over the past couple of years together though.
FAIR is a noted hard right wing organization.
I'm counting both as the result of a single "decision by a rational actor."
Where do you live? That is awesome!
Well maybe, but the Steve Yegge wrote this:

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.fr/2017/05/why-kotlin-is-better...

Obviously these guy love Java. This, frankly, I can't understand. I've hated Java for 20 years :) However if you love Java, obviously you don't need to switch to Kotlin. If like 99% of people used to leaner languages, you find Java unbearably verbose, ugly, etc. Kotlin is a godsend.
Hopefully most if not all of the points mentioned will become equal or better than Java as Kotlin matures