skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Self driving taxis will likely end up a monopolized market, and it may become one of the biggest industries in existence.

The thing is there is no reason that companies could not be, at least theoretically, profitable charging rates that are actually less than it would cost for an individual to own a car. Without a driver their only overhead is the maintenance/insurance on the car itself. And that's something owners have to pay as well -- with the major difference that thanks to economies of scale the taxi monopoly could pay substantially less for. The company that has the most cars will be able to offer faster rides and offer them cheaper.

The potential profit here is really quite incredible. Last year there were 3.2 trillion miles driven in the US alone. Imagine a taxi company is able to snag about 1/3rd of those or about 1 trillion miles. Their profit margin translates to $10 billion net per penny/mile of profit.

So if they can, through economy of scale, operate their vehicles at $0.05/mile less than an individual owner could. And they then sell their service at a $0.01/mile less than what it would cost if you owned the car, then they're turning $40billion/year net. And that's again with 1/3rd the driving market. When you can offer taxis at below ownership prices, who would still own a car?

Tesla seems to be flirting with the possibility of taking this one step further will full vertical integration of production itself. It's already in their license that you're not allowed to use their vehicles (in what will be full autonomous mode) for any ride sharing service except for their yet-to-be-launched one. Interesting future coming up fast!
I was even puzzled by win98...what was special about it? It was basically win95 2.0 iirc.
KDE just shipped Plasma 5.11 which I would consider the beta of Wayland. It is almost there, but it has its fair of glitches, but none of them seem to be game breaking or complicated to overcome at this point.

I compare Plasma Wayland now to Plasma X 5.2-5.4. Almost there, and in two or so releases it should be prime.
The probability of \Bot is 0 because sampling \Bot requires returning from computational digression. That said, there's all kinds of interesting control flow we can describe in a program, knowing it will return a sample, without having any convenient way to prove to a termination-checker that it will.
It's not because I know something that I agree with it..
Do they seriously claim this? It sounds like a pretty far-fetched thing for them to say. I've opened several offices and moved my company around a fair bit, and I don't know how WeWork or anyone else would have their "foot in the door".

Any company approaching the size of twitter is going to contract those services out and either beat them down to very thin margins or manage the services themselves. very little upside in that.
That doesn't really need a study to be done. That's common sense, people will spread false information in any scenario.
The ones who made money are the ones who sold and who are ex-shareholders.
I used http://www.soakyourhead.com/
and this one which is linked elsewhere in the thread.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/files/brainwo...

I doubt the subtle differences between different dual-n-back matter.
And your point is wrong. You seemed to claim that in the dang era rank penalization is a thing of the past. You seem to claim that unsubstantive comments will no longer get you penalized. You are claiming that these decisions are more transparent and less arbitrary than under pg. All three are completely false, but you're just not subjected to them. I was not informed that I had been quietly penalized in any way until I noticed something was amiss, because the fact that that facility even exists is not common knowledge. Sir_Cmpwn didn't even list it in his moderator tools.

The entire second paragraph of the comment to which I replied is wrong. Your followup (which ascribes motive to me, something I note you've gone after others for doing in this thread) is also wrong. I'm not litigating anything. I'm pointing out that you're wrong. You're also forgiven for not being aware of this, given your typical comment quality and status.
My own VPS on OVH. I stuff several other services in there. They get as low as 2.99 Euro per month. Probably pure hosting is much cheaper though.
I'm aware of what the NIF is, I skim read the article so I didn't pick up that they were behind it.
I've found the same thing. I still run ~once a week (and find it boring), but I find competitive sports to be pretty engaging.
> parallel computing in JS is like trying to write a web framework in Rust. Sure, you can do it, but Node is already better suited to doing that. At best, you're making a worse version of something that already exists.

I agree with you, but my point is it's not black and white. For a sufficiently small or simple project, it might make sense to write a web backend in Rust, or do parallel computing in JS, if the cost of learning a new platform outweighs the cost of using the "wrong tool".

In most circumstances, yes, you probably shouldn't use Node.js for parallel computing tasks, just like you shouldn't use C++ for web development, but for some use cases it might be useful. And maybe those use cases don't exist (I don't have much experience in this area, so I don't know), but I just don't like when blanket statements like "use the right tool for the job" dismiss the work other people have done. Surely if Microsoft created this, they have a use case in mind for it?
If all you have is a hammer...
J​.​S. Bach, the Art of the Fugue (Kunst Der Fuge​)​, BWV 1080 – Kimiko Ishizaka
> Sparse heterogeneous data is often the type of data stored in NoSQL dbs.

I still can't imagine what sparse heterogeneous data exists in the world that makes sense to store. Any type of querying or processing requires some kind of structure (even if implicit in the code) which you can just put in different table structures.

You have to make sense of data to process it and that kind of implies a structure, doesn't it? Am I missing some obvious example of heterogeneous data?
Amazon Spends $350k on Seattle Mayor’s Race. PAC Drops $525k
AMP Is Two Years Old
There's a relevant Guardian article today [0]:

'Google executives set foot in the Obama White House more often than those of any other corporation – its head lobbyist visited 128 times. Google spread its money across Washington with joyous ecumenicism. Google spent about $17m on influence peddlers of both partisan varietals. By one count, Google poured more into its DC apparatus than any other public company.'

[0]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/19/surveilla...
Reminds me of JBoss, right down to the astroturfing.
Learning a language is simple. Immerse yourself in the environment where everyone speaks the language (travel to that country) and force yourself to speak that language only at all times. This is the key. I’ve learned German like that in two months.
That doesn't actually sound too bad.

I wonder what prevents these at SF?
Actual title: There is “nothing resembling consensus” about whether the online misinformation problem can actually be solved

Techmeme summary: Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab: Pew survey of 1,116 technologists and other experts: consensus that current environment is conducive to misinfo; 51% say things won't improve over next decade

I have a totally uninformed, "stab-in-the-dark" question: aren't blockchain-based technologies a way to get consensus in an environment where you can't trust anyone? i.e. obtain and maintain Byzantine fault tolerance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance
An average episode of 'Scrubs' written by trained predictive keyboards
1. Advertisements.

2. Analytics.

3. Cool visual effects.

Companies wanted to know more about how their websites are used. A noble goal for sure but nowadays it's a blatant surveillance.
> also think it's unlikely that a future society will allocate resources to revive these people.

This is the easy part. If a cryonics company survives that long, they will get a lot of new customers if they manage to revive an old one.
In complete sincerity, I think that speeding up Turing-complete probabilistic programming to the kinds of inference speed we can get in the gradient-descent training of deep neural networks would be a "change the world"-level advance for ML/AI.
Vinay Gupta on Why Ethereum Is the Future
> I wouldn't be surprised if their next bet is the next 'W hotels'

They already are doing that targeting the very small business audience:

https://www.welive.com/
I've always wanted to be fluent in a second language and have tried in the past, but I always end up with the same problem.

While I recognize that the only way to gain conversational skills is to actually have conversations, they terrify me. Engaging in small talk with strangers in my native language is hard enough. Trying to do it in a second language seems impossible. Even watching the demo video from the link, all I could think was "this is awkward".

I would almost rather there be a sort of script or game around the conversations, so they're not relying on my ability to be interesting while also trying to do it in a different language.
How does one learn Mandarin Chinese though
The link does not compare running versus other forms of exercise. It compares running vs no exercise. "Running increases neurogenesis[1] more than anything else." is not a finding in the article.
All of those things are either what you'd expect when you rent a normal office space or aren't the amazing extra perk you make them out to be. The meeting rooms you had to pay to use. The coffee and beer are included in the total price and aren't really that valuable anyway. And the beer and toilet paper frequently ran out. And the phone booths didn't even have doors, they had curtains.

It was nice, especially since I was an employee, not the company renting the space, but the only real benefit was there would be occasional free meals and not having to leave the building to go to the occasional meetup.com style meetup that happened there.

I'm guessing the price per square foot isn't that amazing compared to what you could get at other places, though.
Warby Parker Costume Council
I think it's pretty easy for this discussion to become about personalities and not methodologies. Gelman is pretty brash and speaks his mind, so he could be correct on methodology and have that get lost in the noise.

So I'll give my opinion as a datascientist: null hypothesis significance testing is broken, the whole thing needs to get chucked. It's not fixable, and it's not only p-hacking that's the problem. Go read Frank Harrell, I like his writings on the topic more than Gelman's.
What if you did this memory game while running?!
'Anaemic' iPhone 8 demand drags Apple shares lower
>And then I learned that I also need autoconf/automake/m4

Make is well on its own, especially for everything that is not portable C.

>server applications ship entire operating systems in glorified chroots;

- Docker containers are running chroot'ed

- Containers still do have an whole POSIX-ly userland with shell and coreutils. You can extract every container onto an disk and make an static linux kernel boot it.
https://github.com/sctb/woe

Indeed this is cool.

To compile on BSD, I used

gcc -static -std=c89 -Wall -pedantic -o woe woe.c -lm
Cash-Burn Threatens Blue Apron 3.5 Months After IPO
This seems to have some interesting tools baked into it. Is S76 really innovating here or is this just a remix and reskin of tools already available?
Gold use to back the dollar. Now it's backed by a military.
That graph is great, you can see how low US spending was before WW2, but then the cold war began and it trended up. Then the USSR dissolved, and the US's spending was trending down, but then 9/11 happened and it spiked upward again.
I agree. I wonder if most people in this thread saying that renting your own space is cheaper has ever really done this. I have, a bunch, and keeping the lights on is not free in terms of time/money. At a small company, this means either you hire someone to handle all this stuff, or make the employees do it. Either way, running an office yourself ends up being expensive.
Forwarding isn't going to happen, but we have plans to implement RDP. X forwarding via Xwayland actually still works on Wayland, by the way.
Paying for Dirt: Where Have Home Values Detached from Construction Costs?
I think the difference here is a company building a community rather than a community building around a company.

A modern example of the latter is visible in the municipalities clamouring to accommodate Amazon. Time will tell if that one ends in another broken city.
In a lot of markets, WeWork is a great deal. We just moved from Chicago West Loop WeWork to our first real office; we got what I think is a pretty amazing deal on our new office and it is still very difficult to beat the package WeWork puts together.

But that's not the critique being leveled at WeWork here; the critique is, WeWork can't in the long run be profitable at these rates. In a lot of their spaces --- maybe all of them? --- they're overstaffed. They're premium-everything (I wanted the couches from the first floor at WeWork West Loop and asked where they got them; they were custom-designed!). Free beer on every floor (this turns out not to be a win, but it's still part of their cost basis). Most importantly: they site these things in marquee locations that they have to be paying a mint to lease.

I'm happy to take full advantage of the largesse of Investor Storytime Economics, but unless you're Amazon, the music has to stop playing at some point. WeWork is not Amazon.
Perhaps you're wearing sexism-colored glasses.
Effective Sales Technique Tips
I'd absolutely not recommend young people move here, unless they want something just plain middle class and hard work. To live here and truly enjoy it as I do, really takes a great deal of money.
because by the time problems become blindingly apparent in parts of the city that have already been redeveloped, they are effectively unfixable.
> "Although 11 new papers have recently been published that do not show the downstream effects of power posing on behaviors, Cuddy is still fighting for power posing."

Sounds like straight up bad science to me
Which is a little more than the amount of money they lost the last two years. Taking into account their 100M in the back this gives them roughly 3.5 years at the same loss level.
check out:

https://gnosis.pm

you could probably solve it with something like a prediction market.
> Requesting money to Wikipedia viewers is done so often it gets as annoying as an advertisement-packed Wikipedia would potentially be.

I wonder, do many people here agree about this? I don't keep track, but feel like I only see the fundraising messages 2-3 times a year. This is way more preferable to me than seeing (probably multiple) ads on every page all the time.
I disagree. Most of the flagged topics are already being shoved in tech peoples' faces through Reddit, mainstream/tech news, their workplace and their social network (that is most likely liberal). Hacker News is a sort of safe space away from those topics. They are fully aware of the topics and choose to not participate in them.

edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent
Seems like overkill for just a static site. I'd rather upload my assets somewhere and have it served out of the box than configuring and securing a web server for arguably negligible benefit.
Looking at the numbers:

A typical Dollar General costs $250,000 to open.

The average sales per square foot is $229.

The store in the article is 17,000 sq ft.

Dollar Generals overall profit margins are 30%.

That store should have earned ~$3,900,000 in sales its first year, which is roughly $1.2 million in profits.

No wonder they are expanding so fast, the profits cover the initial investment costs in as little as 3 months. That's incredible.
These services have real costs, and at least in the case of food, water, and shelter, risk (and its side effects) is a minor part of consumption, and so doesn't introduce distortions.

Ensuring income adequate for access to these necessities is a fundamental and long-established principle of economics. "A man must always live by his work" comes straight from Adam Smith.

The problems are multiple.

Wages tend to (or below) subsistence. Rents (economic) eat up excess consumer value, not just producer costs. Not all people can (or should) work. And there are cases where risk components and externalities can lead to both over- and under-consumption (famously: healthcare, both ways).
Ask HN: What are your favorite tech websites?
Places you visit to read tutorials and that are community focused?

Conditions of Acceptance:

You can't mention Hacker News or StackOverflow
I don't think it's a case of people being negative about the idea of WeWork - the issue is is that WeWork's product is/will be commoditized, and as such will be subject to intense price competition.

This is good for people who enjoy WeWork's product, since there are (and will be more) competitors that offer a similar experience for less money.

But it's bad for WeWork's valuation - and that's the core thing being brought up. WeWork's valuation is based on the idea that they can charge a premium for their product (relative to more traditional office rentals or other coworking providers), and/or that they can sell significant ancillary services on top of the base rental fees.

I don't think either of those expectations have played out, and IMO there are lots of reasons to believe that they won't play out at all.

WeWork isn't the only one - SV is full of startups that expected to exist in a premium marketplace that isn't as sensitive to price competition, but found themselves instead running a well-executed, but extremely commoditized product.
I don't think it needs judgment passed, that was shitty! Thank you for finding this.

Dave: I was out of line and there was no point for me to be dick-waving with you like that. I can't say it's possible for me to read everything you did into what I said, but it was a shitty thing to say regardless. I apologize.
"This obviously depends on the relative costs. Cost of side effects, buying the drugs, time going to treatment, etc."

I'm going to suggest if you're facing death from an AIDS-related illness, a relative risk of 2.00 vs. 1.87 will feel very, very similar to you.

"To begin with, if they can't nail down a quantifiable effect that is stable from study to study, who knows what is going on? Why would you have confidence in their estimates of effectiveness if they are inconsistent with one another?"

Define "stable" - because even if the effect of something is fixed in the same way a physical constant it, it's invariable sampled with error.

Again, if I give you five studies that suggest that HAART improves survival by:

100%, 102%, 87%, 94% and 96%

are you really going to suggest that we don't know that HAART improves survival?
Tokyo is what I would consider modern and is miles ahead of most of the big cities I have lived in or visited. Just having public transport that respects their customers (unlike the TTC in Toronto) is already a big improvement.
[Event] Why Voice, Why Now? Trends in A.I. And Voice-Driven Technology
I don't think you are correct here. The advantage of using sparse storage and sparse matrix multiplication is that you can get savings in both storage and runtime. There would be no point in using sparse storage if runtime still scaled with the cube of vocab size. It would be that way if the best way of getting sparse SVD is by materializing a dense matrix product, but people have discovered smarter ways using sparse matvec. The time complexity for obtaining k eigenvalues seems to be O(dkn) where d is the average number of nonzeroes per row, and n is the vocab size [1]. Therefore, one can assert that sparse SVD too is linear in vocab size just like word2vec.

This is corroborated by the link elsewhere in this thread that shows SVD enjoying lower wall clock time on the 1.9B word Wikipedia dataset [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanczos_algorithm#Application_...

[2] https://rare-technologies.com/making-sense-of-word2vec/
Especially because, unlike the NSA, they can't send legally-enforceable secret letters telling MSFT and ORCL what to do.
As I indicated up-thread, I'm mostly on your side of these politics.

geofft's comment hits the nail on the head when it comes to what effect this did vs. should've had on her tenure case, I think. A study that fails to replicate is no indication of malice or even incompetence. Some say she should've run self-replications, but how many years self-replication studies are you willing to run on $20k/yr (in fact, how many post-college years have you made 20k/yr for a full-time job)?

At some point you get the quality of science you can pay for, and throwing the grad student under the bus by denying them tenure a decade later is as shitty and spineless as Equifax throwing an IT guy under the bus for what was pretty clearly an organizational failure. IMO.

Re: TED talks, TED is not a scientific venue, and most of the things I hear in TED talks are a hell of a lot less scientific than even Cuddy's most flawed studies. Also, I don't think those sorts of things should weigh much in hiring and tenure cases either way (aside from e.g. a usually marginal "service/outreach" category).

If Harvard hired Cuddy because she gave a popular TED talk, then that was an extremely poor hiring decision by Harvard. But that's a separate issue from the one we're discussing.
Looks like Ubuntu minus few apps plus new theme {-:
I don't disagree, but we haven't seen them close the distance in terms of performance.

Let me clarify a bit, I'm not saying that this tactic is invalid or inefficient within our current system, in fact this is a great way to land a good payday if you can pull it off. My point was more that MongoDB is going to implode when their performance shortfalls become visible to the wider populace, if that happens, of course. It's still possible they take the earnings from this IPO and dump heavy into R&D investment to make up the lost ground, but it's also very possible they take this payday and ride out the tech until it breaks down.
This is me - I had taken SQL at uni and found MongoDB to be much easier to reason about since I knew my frontend parts already. One of the apps I've built has a terrible database structure (my first real life server setup!), and is probably the worst codebase I've ever written. I will never show it publicly. It currently serves 100k+ users and the users have no idea how messed up the server code is. It won't scale to a million users, but that's okay and the technology served me well as a junior.

I since turned to RethinkDB and sometimes just a classic SQL will do, but Mongo is really easy to get started with.
> Did that money come into their hands completely voluntarily?

Yes, if it's in the form of an investment. An investment is a risk, and like it or not, investments are a vital part of any economy. In may cases investments are how small businesses and entrepreneurs get capitalized because banks are much more risk averse. So why punish such a critical segment of the economy? You'll only end up moving the money into other areas that have less benefit for the rest of society.
So, any business that offers free communications infrastructure, like reddit and other forums. You need manual ad curation to identify political ads, or you have fines that you might have to pay.