skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why Humble Bundle sold out itself and over 100M customers
That all seems like a net positive to me, especially in major urban areas that a very car dependent like Los Angles, Atlanta, Houston...

In LA, driving drunk was just the way of life, and it was a real problem. Now, I don't know anyone who prefers driving over ridesharing given the option. Uber Pool makes getting from the east side to the west side faster that public transit for about $10-15, which is less than 1 drink and 1000x less than a DUI.

It is disingenuous to fault ridesharing for public transit's problems. Of course people are going to opt for the most value. We could raise taxes and invest in improvements that may materialize in 10 years, but that's a hard sell when you have a really good option right now.
Part of the challenge is all of the invisible costs of cars. Repairs & maintenance & tires are usually just as much as gas, but nobody thinks about that. Road maintenance for the city is stupid expensive, parking lots are too. But it's all magicked behind the curtain.

Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.
True, but airlines have absolutely made coach seats smaller and closer together over the years. And we're fatter on average than back then.
Blame them both.
Lawrence Berkeley Lab has a C++ to Fortran compiler called FABLE: http://cci.lbl.gov/fable/

Curious if anyone in your group considered using it?
It's worth one day finding a printing press class and setting some type by hand. For one thing, what you'll produce is beautiful, and it really gives a sense of how much art, work, and mastery goes into type.
Subsidies are here to accomplish economies of scale. And when they have that scale, the cost of ride will also decrease dramatically (run buses instead of cars, electric cars/buses?), so my bet is that there will be an increase in price but it won't be order of magnitude more than current price.
They went ahead and wrote it down.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Although dated, this essay ought to be required reading for everyone involved in software development IMO.

Story time; about 15 years ago I was at Big Dumb Inc on a team dedicated to a specific customer. Our group manager thought it would be a great idea to have a different member lead the weekly staff meeting every week. This is how valuable the meeting was (/s it was a waste of everyone's time). When my turn came around, I printed off copies of this, handed it out, and assigned it to be read, and said "that's all for this week". Some people actually read it, but I'm pretty sure that stunt contributed to a souring the realationship between my boss and I.
Sure, I wrote herd not Hurd!

herd is the commandname of Shepherd client:

https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html
This is not something I've ever thought about but does seem to solve a few concerns. Even in my small town, I can think of many frequently used routes and locations that would benefit from an 'Uber-Bus'.
It is when you need to be somewhere at a specific time or not be sweaty when you get there. There are also areas which lack proper pedestrian infrastructure making it very dangerous to walk.
Funnily enough, NixOS has had its initial release in the same year as Gobolinux, 2003.

I'm not sure how Gobolinux organizes files exactly, but with NixOS, the hash in /nix/store/<hash>-packagename is produced by combining every input that might influence the package. By input I mean for example:

- The source: git revision / source url / etc.

- All dependencies, which means if a dependency of a dependency of this package changes, it gets a new hash

- Build instructions, including build flags

This wouldn't be possible with a more conventional file structure.
What do you mean "unable to make it work". Why should buses/train/subway have to be profitable? Roads for your car sure aren't.

Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades.

Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundred axles is a lot more traffic demanding road upgrades as well.
How  How to Get Creative on Social Media – Adoktech
Ask HN: What is the expected knowledge level for jr dev jobs?
I started learning on my own a few months back and want to to apply to jobs in a years time. So what are the things that I must know for me to viably get a job?
There are repos around packaging tons of non-free (mainly scientific) software for Guix.
> It may increase the "total miles traveled" but doesn't it also increase occupancy density in the cars

If it did then it wouldn't increase total VMT. Again there are "deadhead" miles in those cars without any passengers at all, a fifth of those trips wouldn't have happened in the first place, and two fifths would have used alternatives that don't contribute to VMT. (According to the study.)
Deep dive into GDPR and its impact to data management platform
Can We Build a Distributed Trust Network?
Do you regularly get offered the Uber Pass? I've gotten it once, and I used the hell out of it, so now I'm pretty convinced that I'll never be offered again.
Oh, as opposed to all the internet privacy the last administration(s) gave us?
Or you could be applying for a HPC research job in one of the countless non-university setting that also does that sort of thing. Then having both a relevant PhD and some relevant hands on experience will be extremely helpful.
During most normal operations such as updates, inserts and deletes it will enforce them. But, opposed to other databases, you are allowed to completely ignore your foreign key constraints leaving you with a (in my opinion) possibly corrupt database.

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;
INSERT INTO ...
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;

Now you might have data in your database that's actually incorrect.
I'm a foreign student in Germany, living in a small city with 200K population. Public transportation is just fascinating compared to size/population of the city. More than ten tram lines. Countless number of buses.
Subsidies here are not for economies of scale, but for market share. Your bet is a risky one vs proven methodology.
One good example of this is to run your code on both 32 bit, 64 bit, big endian and little endian machines of all those combinations. That works pretty good as a way to keep you on your toes with respect to portability.
> The statistics don’t really tell that story.

> In my personal, typical case

They may not tell that story in this particular case, but unless something is wrong with the way with the statistics are gathered, it does present a better top-level picture than personal anecdotes. (While personal anecdotes can also be useful in understanding how to design around edge cases, but are not useful when figuring out the best way to design a system).
A React and Meteor Combination, realtime social network
Not the only one, surely? Cost factors in, and some folks make choices based on what they think might be best for longer than "right now"
If the profit margin is so high, be prepared for hungry competitors.

Your margin my opportunity sort of thing :)

My current org builds all infrastructure to run in multiple cloud providers, and we spend over a million a month on cloud services.
The last time I checked, the patents have expired on anything pre-Pentium, and by now the Pentium patents probably have expired too.
Loved this game -- super simple and addictive. Just the right length, very thought provoking.
>> because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk.

That's what my friends use it for.

It's a shame, because in the smaller midwestern towns, we don't really have Uber yet so it can't be used. Drunk driving here isn't even given a second thought.
"Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, “So, you’re the UNIX guru.”

"At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words. Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX."

– Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_ (p. 78). HarperCollins.
Garage doesn't literally mean garage in this context. Another way to put it is: Most fast growing tech companies are started by young people barely into adulthood on a laptop.

I see a lot of late 20's in your list, and a lot of companies that started with one person writing some code on a computer.
For instance, Canada (which, despite its resource based economy, is generally seen as fairly similar to the US) has no mortgage interest deduction, doesn't permit mortgages for terms of longer than 5 years (amortization is generally for 25 years but you refinance as a matter of course at least every 5 years), and generally provinces are more tenant-friendly than the most tenant friendly US states (e.g. California) with things such as limiting rent increases based on government inflation figures. The tax rules around exempting capital gains from the sale of a primary residence are also different in Canada - more generous but also with more stringent requirements.
I don't think the study is "faulting" anyone. Clearly ridesharing is a very popular and convenient alternative to driving and public transit which are both rife with problems. It is however contributing to traffic and emissions. Those are important facts to establish because previously it was thought that maybe ridesharing is helping with those too, like a dream come true.

It concludes, "substantial policy action may be required to ensure that ride-hailing can effectively be woven into the transportation network while reducing congestion and the emissions of transportation services. Absent of these efforts, congestion and emissions appear likely to grow."[1]

[1] https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis/pubs/d...
Looking into the full policy, they seem to punch some pretty big loopholes in it

> Here are just some of the ways we use it. To:
> Deliver Relevant Advertising;
> Create External Marketing & Analytics Reports;

http://about.att.com/sites/privacy_policy/full_privacy_polic...
The author mentions trouble with portability and reliance on standard guarantees, and then goes on to talk about Julia, a single-implementation language that is "rapidly evolving" with breaking changes and no standard to speak of?
> It's much, much harder to keep track of logical block location, especially if you need to handle surprise removal of power.

Is there a good reason at this point for Flash controllers to bother doing this part at all, instead of:

1. maintaining the per-block erase count metrics internally;

2. exposing the raw physical blocks over ATA;

3. adding an ATA protocol extension that returns the erase-count for a block whenever it's read/written?

Under such a system, the OS would maintain the logical block map (probably as a "layer" in logical volume management, mapping a wear-prone PV to a wearless, but gradually shrinking LV.) It could even put the logical-block-map metadata on a different disk, or pool the logical block maps for a bunch of disks together for a RAID-set and then RAID-mirror the pool, or whatever else. Basically you could play around with such maps the way you can play around with Linux's thin-pool metadata volumes.
Queen of the Skies.
Thank you, very interesting read! They do raise a few good points where MySQL outperforms PostgreSQL. I suppose that's one of the trade offs between them, data safety vs. performance.
> And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.

It's worth discussing, but not in terms of "evil rideshares are up to their evil evils again" but in terms of "why public transit fails to satisfy the needs of the people that choose to use rideshares instead, and how it can be improved so that it starts to satisfy more people". The goal should be making people's lives better, not achieving reduction in some abstract statistical metric.
When discussing long-term stocks and the market, I'm always reminded of this article from the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...
DOCX files are just ZIP files that contain XML, JPG, PNG, etc.

You might be able to unpack the ZIP, manage the content with git, then repack them.
There doesn't appear to be a license detailed either on the website or in the download zip. With each page having "© 2017 | All rights reserved UnderExpress.com" or similar on, including those in the zip, it isn't clear what "free" means. E.g. am I free to use it, modify it, distribute it etc., and if so how and with what restrictions.

For something like this, particularly if you are wanting to make it popular so that you can make money from support, I would suggest MIT or similar license.
Previous HN discussion related to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041403
Which C# libraries were used in comparison? The 2 I know of, EPPlus and ClosedXML, do much more than just read cell values, so it's unfair to compare against those. For example the additional complexity of handling styles adds overhead.

Disclaimer: I'm a current ClosedXML contributor.
> I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then.

BART is already exceedingly safe. Even with robberies rising 45% this year the overall robbery rate is projected to be 1.7 per million trips[1].

To put it another way, if every time you rode the BART you also bought a CA lottery scratch-card you'd be about as likely to get robbed as you would to win the jackpot (normalized odds for a $2 scratch card: 0.00000167[2], normalized odds for robbery 0.0000017).

Do I think BART is a great system? Absolutely not. Do I prefer taking a Lyft to the airport rather than the BART? Yes. But I've worked in cities with unsafe public transit systems, and the BART simply doesn't compare.

[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Crime-stats-show-where-s...
[2]: http://www.calottery.com/LotteryHome/play/scratchers-games/$...
Fortran is a much simpler and safer language than C++. And faster to learn. Fortran is even somewhat simpler than C or Java, whereas C++ is probably the most complicated language in the known universe.

So especially in the hands of non-experts, Fortran should produce less bugs.
Tell us more. I am not familiar with this side of Amazon.
For anyone reading this in the US: don't take this at face value.

This (my opinion) is coming from someone who's indifferent between renting vs. owning, so is trying to make the decision purely on financial factors.

Reasons why this article does't apply in the US:

(1) The "eigenmietwert" the author writes about is known as an "imputed income tax". The idea is, most assets generate income: bonds pay interest, stocks pay dividends, etc. A house, which is an asset, always generates economic benefit, it's just a question of the owner (who lives in it), or to a renter (who pays rent). When you think about it, it's kind of absurd that in the US, an owner pays income tax if they rent their house to someone else, but not to themself. Taxes like this are an attempt to level the playing field.

(2) The US allows homeowners to deduct mortgage interest (up to a point) from taxable income. Why you can't deduct interest on credit cards or auto loans, but you can on mortgage interest, beats the hell out of me?

(3) The US taxes capital gains. California, where I live, has a state-level _surtax_ on capital gains. I'm not sure whether the author is correct about Swiss tax treatment of capital gains, but have no reason to think he's wrong.

(4) Interest rates are artificially cheap in the US, as some others have pointed out, due to GSE interference in the mortgage market. There's absolutely no reason Fannie/Freddie should encourage people to buy houses. I also think it's ridiculous that the FHA uses taxpayer funds to let low-income borrowers get cheap loans. Let them rent. Renting isn't some kind of hardship, in many ways, it's better than owning, you have less downside risk and it's easier to relocate for a job.

(5) In places like California, where we have Prop 13, property taxes don't reassess -- ever. So, barring a sale, someone who bought a house 30 years ago pays essentially what they paid in property tax then, now. This encourages exactly what you'd think, people move less and try to stay in their homes as long as possible, even performing absurd tax gymnastics like "one-wall remodels" to avoid having their tear-down "remodels" reassessed.

(6) "1031 exchanges" and other gimmicks let property owners sell their properties--AT A GAIN--and trade up to a larger place, without ever paying tax. How crazy is this!?

(7) In most jurisdictions, property taxes are federally deductible; I get no such deduction as a renter, though it could be argued that my rent is lower as a result (due to the owner's tax writeoff).

At bottom, this stems from a cultural attitude we have in the US (really the entire Anglosphere) that homeownership is some sort of God-given right/natural thing to aspire to. I wish this attitude would change. I wouldn't mind renting but it's hard to justify given how tilted US law is toward homeownership.
I wasn't around back then, but AFAIK it improved over time.
There's not only luggage. There are groceries. There are other purchases. There's just a strain of standing on your feet for an hour, which may not be easy for someone who is not in the peak physical condition.
They have built-in change tracking.
"If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to:"

...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.
> The standard does not guarantee that this gives you an array of double-float: it may (if the implementation provides them), otherwise you get an array of element type T. This turned out to be a major difficulty for implementing portable scientific code in Common Lisp.

Wouldn't sticking to say SBCL (that does give you specialized arrays) be equivalent to using a one-implementation language that does the same?
You don't need to support multiple implementations when writing a library when there's only one

Whereas to ignore CL & stick to SBCL will be working to fracture the community-- perhaps necessary, but CL is already a niche community
Is any of them usable without excel e.g. on Linux?
That's a bingo. Exhibit A is Trump giving the keynote at the Values Voters Summit.
The convention in Julia is to not have unicode in user-facing APIs. That way you're not forcing unicode on anyone. All of the big libraries and the Base module do this. So you can use unicode for your variables to match your paper if you want, but no library (that I know of) is going to force you to have unicode support in your terminal.
With the NetzDG things have pretty much changed IMO. Your privacy can be invaded without any "proven" reason.
Does anyone know the impact of ride-sharing on restaurants, entertainment venues, shopping, and other activities not close to rapid transit or bus stations?
The fifth of those trips that don't happen sounds bad to me. Does this mean that, for example, people are not going to get groceries because they can't carry all of that on a bicycle or a bus?

From the article, "Ride-hailing users have higher personal vehicle ownership rates than those who use “transit only”: 52% versus 46%." This point seems like a non-point. First, that's not a very big gap. Also, Do richer people pollute less or congest less than poorer people? I don't think so, so having the car in the garage is better than having it on the road, and no different than not having it at all.
looks like both links have been taken down
The last thing you want to happen in a RAID is for all the drives to wear out simultaneously, so this could be a feature rather than a bug.
> Which comes with its own set of problems.

Such as? Seriously, I'm running it like that and it works fine. I'll grant that Ruby on Windows only kind of works, but no problems with PG or MySQL.

I do agree though that WSL ought to run as a Windows service and do the normal Linux boot process when that starts.
Russia may soon issue its official blockchain-based currency, the CryptoRuble
The more CO2 is in atmosphere, the sweeter and less mineral-rich plants become, becoming less beneficial to poisonous to surrounding animals and insects.
Ah — confusing as Herd is the second recursive acronym of Hurd... sorry to pedantic :-)
The event loop doesn't strictly have to act as a global lock. It just has to appear to act as a global lock to any observer.
You can already vpn pretty easily on an Android phone. The bigger issue is how do we know that the VPN is trustworthy?
Most bars have the names of taxi services to call if you're over the limit. To still drive because that's inconvenient is quite literally criminal.
The Makers of Things
Amazon shareholder letters seem to be becoming the new Berkshire shareholder letters [0]. They are friendly, engaging, and most importantly, written by an author who steadfastly holds by principles that haven't changed in decades.

If you haven't read any of the berkshire letters you really should.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html
Oooh! Thanks for linking this write-up. I've been thinking of playing around with Nix and basically only be able to do it on a VPS.

Before I get started though, what things could I consider implicit prerequisites of running Nix? For example: I've never built a Debian or RPM package. Would I be better served gaining some background in OS package management before diving into this?
Cute skinner box game. Includes just enough variety in mechanics and twists and turns to keep me interested in what happens next despite the insulting "click this button 10,000 times and wait half an hour" mechanics.
I'm not the parent comment, but I used to get offered Uber pass immediately after the previous one expired. Recently they switched over to option to auto-renew rather than having to manually buy a new pass each time. I'm in Portland, OR so it may be location specific.
>> Professors usually have this legacy code on hand (often code they wrote themselves decades ago) and pass this code on to their students

So cut-n-paste code. The students are running code that they don't really know what it does, it might not even be correct...it's like StackOverflow in academia.
I calculate a different way.

Right now it's $322 to fly SFO to JFK for a trip of 5172 miles that's 3.1¢/mile. Compare a $8.25 trip Mountain view to San Francisco round trip at 20.6 ¢/mile. Are trains so inefficient that it's cheaper to fly than to ride?

Excuse me while I create a commuter airline between cities in the bay area.
Probably by legalese.

"We're not selling it, we license it."
Yes,i it was an overstatement. But, while I do see it can be done with these Monoids, I haven't come across these kinds of numerical linear algebra libraries that allow generic code in other languages (here's an example of what I find in Haskell that requires double: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hmatrix-0.14.0.1/docs/Nu...)
virtualenv solves virtual environment as much as pip solves OS package management. Not that it's not useful, but you see all over where you have little fiefdoms that work pretty well for their little ecosystem, but become a mess if you integrate stuff outside (virtualenv, rbenv or pip, npm, gem, rpm, apt or make, ant, scons, jam).

A lot of these systems are just reimplementations tailored to language-X. Nix is pretty unique and clever. For example, you can effectively version control you virtual environment, it's at the OS level, and accommodates major languages and libraries (Python, Perl, Lua, Java, Go, Qt).