skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> rejecting the complaints this mood inspires

It turns out that it's really hard to be against communities democratically controlling their own destinies and not look like a monster. Local governments and the policies they make to preserve their built environments are about as pure and non-corrupt as democracy gets.

Does any place in America have high-density market-rate construction because the community genuinely supports it? Far as I can tell, it's only possible to have a city in America when the government is sufficiently corrupt / community is sufficiently disempowered that developers can cram it through.

I'm grateful for these places. I'm happy to live in one. But you have to recognize that cities in America are only possible to the extent that America is corporatist and undemocratic. Any strengthening of our communities, our democracy, or local government has always and will always reinforce the overwhelming majority support for sprawl and "fuck you, I got mine."
What ar we creating celebrities out of people who blogged about their experiences?

She made a courageous public statement. Should she get to move forwards in her chosen technical career with this shadow behind her, or must she be turned into a social crusader?

That weirdly distorts incentives of behavior.
That's why I like group gambling games like poker. The casino wins from transaction fees, and players are competing against each other.
What do you mean? The purple pill looks like fun!
Iraq war Was fundamentally different. NK is extremely hierarchical, once the leadership is removed, the country can be reconstructed much easier. I can't say I care about Seth Bannons opinion.
What Code Golf Taught Me About Python
Changing the price first has the disadvantage of possibly losing the sale.
To add to this, people's perception of Rust:

- Exception -> Rust's panic

Reality:

- Runtime assert -> Rust's panic

- Exception -> Rust's Result (ie error monad)
The problem as I see it is you don't have to actively run it over budget in bad faith.

Even as an ethical actor you can only price what is specified. However, you can then use your knowledge about likely the real variances that will be needed and risk profile to place a bid that takes this into account to remove margin or discount the bid price.
> Cost plus percentage gives a very clear incentive to raise costs; that's the only way you can get more profit

Case in point: SpaceX challenging the launch industry's cost-plus culture with publicly-posted fixed prices [1].

[1] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
> It adds delays in the short-term

A delay in this project is a safety risk. They are trying to have a working spillway by Nov 1, so if unexpected rains cause another extreme inrush into the lake they can handle it by releasing >100,000 cfs from the spillway. Without that ability, they are risking failure of the emergency spillway and the flooding[1][2] of a large part of the central valley.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVcGUvE3BBc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p0Hc56vJ2Y
When it doesn't work for someone, that means they were doing it wrong rather than that they were defying the laws of thermodynamics.

The useful thing to do at that point is to diagnose what they were doing wrong and how to correct for that instead of claiming they were defying the laws of physics.
You are acting as though it's questionable whether Stalin and Mao got involved in the Korean War to prevent the spread of democracy. Check out the book The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot. It covers the history of the Korean War and Stalin and Mao's actions. Also, a really great story about the famous fighter pilot No Kum-sok.
Strong, general AI will be its own species, with its own unique way of thinking and its own quirks. Trying to replicate humans exactly is futile and worthless.

Well said.

We don't need a human made of silicon for that. We need a mechanical dog.

That's a very eloquent way of putting it. I may have to steal this quote from you sometime!
> No one knows how many people die in North Korean concentration camps every year

It's less than 70,000 each year, which is how many have died due to the Iraq war. If North Korea deserves war, what does the United States deserve?
Isn't it guaranteed to run at the exact point where the function in which "defer" was used returns?
> abstract non-entity as having responsibility for an outcome?

The patriarchy is routinely responsible for despicable outcomes.
Very true. Thanks for pointing this out.
We Need More Best Practices in GraphQL
I think the one good thing about the Harvey Weinstein scandal is that it has brought to light that the issue of sexual harassment is not just a Silicon Valley problem, it's a problem that is almost universal in our country. I've written here several times here that articles similar to this one are more likely to backfire as they help perpetuate the idea that the tech industry is hostile to women and they should stay away. I've been thinking the best way to eliminate sexism in tech is to bring more women in to the industry. But hopefully, this increased awareness throughout the country will bring it to an end, not just in tech, but in every sector of the economy.
Quick Google searches indicate about three watts. To a first approximation, you are not concave when talking on a cell phone, so figure at most 1.5W travelling in your direction. Humans are definitely not opaque to radio, but let's suppose I am. Personally, I weigh 90kg, so for me it's something like 15mW per kg at most, for the small handful of minutes per day I spend on the cell phone.

My level of concern about this could not be lower.
Re: 4, it's funny because while Seattle is somewhat dense by American standards...it's still got tons and tons of areas that are restricted to only low-density detached single family homes. A major city like Seattle should have few if any areas like that.

(Not that SFHs should be illegal of course, but they shouldn't be mandated)
It's the difference between loving someone and using them.
There must be some incredible data being mined by Amazon via Whole Foods. At the Whole Foods in Palo Alto, there seems to be an elaborate pricing experiment in the ice cream department. Entire brands (Talenti) are dropped in price 70%. Other times, particular flavors are reduced that much, sometimes less so. For Talenti, the entire brand is sold out. Some of the on-sale flavors go quickly or are also sold out while others are completely ignored, despite the discount (namely anything from Three Twins, who's blurb on their ice cream and their shop at SFO make them sound like assholes). Maybe 25% of the options in that section are discounted, and the amount of discounts varies as well, with a number of different steps like (80%, 50%, 35%, 20%, 10% or similar). Nothing else in the shop is stratified like that. Beer and wine might have 2% of the options on sale. Ditto produce and meat. Most departments offer no discounts.
"secure the natural resources it needs to grow"

This gets repeated a lot. Maybe Chinese propaganda make this point to justify its outward investments to the Chinese people. Statements like this then take on a sinister sheen when discussed in the West.

Commodities are fungible and China is rich in natural resources itself. Oil is the one thing it is insecure about yet the insecurity is much more about a potential blockade in time of conflict than insufficiency of suppliers. Yes it has interests to see more supplies so it certainly would encourage investments in natural resources but to control the resources? That doesn't even make sense in the modern (WTO) context. It can't even control rare earth exports when 90% of the supply is based inside China, how can it expect to control supplies outside of China?

China has a high savings rate and runs a trade surplus and by necessity it will export capital. There is no other way around it. The Chinese government right now finds it more attractive investing in overseas infrastructures than buying more US Treasury bills.
China, who knows them best, seems to disagree. Otherwise they would have taken care of the Kim family years ago.

There were similar "this is different! It will be easy!" arguments made for Iraq as well, especially when people suggested it could be like Vietnam (in the quagmire sense, not US causalities sense)
Nah she didnt bring down Travis she’s pretty much irreverent.
I enjoyed reading that, but why did the boy put his finger in the hole if he was worried about being late to school?
> You act like this is some malicious or unexpected new behavior

No, I'm pretty GP "acts like"

> After many years of desensitization to this practice since the first iPhone, it is neither "a secret" nor "scandalous"

I've never really understood the absurd (but common!) argument that a repugnant state of affairs isn't worth discussion if it isn't new. Usually, the heckler even agrees with the person they're heckling! What's the goal? Sabotage of a cause one agrees with merely to redeem hipster / cynic points? I don't get it.

It's disappointing that GP felt the need to preemptively address this possibility in their post, but it's downright silly that parent didn't even let this fact stop them. So it goes.
Facebook intentionally addicts it’s users, and research increasingly shows that the use of its product is associated with declining mental health. Facebook plays a clearly negative role in society and is apparently run by people who don’t respect the public. No one should work there.
The target is not so big as I initially though. Individual developers would (I think) not normally pay for that, and mid-big companies have their own team.

So this is either for developers who can spare some money for great docs or for small companies doing OSS.

Question, what is stopping you from contacting through the form? Maybe I can also learn how to improve it.
Orbitz also played with how they rank search results. After finding Mac users were likely to spend 30% more on a nightly room rate, they started putting higher priced rooms at the top when Mac users searched.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/06/26/155756095/...
Why would they have a lot of integrity? From what I heard, she actually exaggerated some events.
Ask HN: Do you test the code of your MVPs and early versions?
I wish the article connected the dots of her path from studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania to working as an SRE at a San Francisco tech company. It seems like that might be an interesting part of her story.

I loved the anecdote of her buying her own leather jacket when Uber couldn't be bothered to buy them for women. Brilliant.

The title is a bit unfortunate in that it makes her sound like an Attorney General but that's nothing to with her but the NY Time's Maureen Dowd who has a penchant for sensational titles.
You might be right. I think we agree more than we disagree.

I'm certainly not against giving more advice than CICO and I'm not saying we should expect people to derive things from first principles, just that any method of weight loss that works will be working by CICO and understanding that is far more useful than not, and that it is outright harmful for people to suggest that it doesn't work.

I actually wrote a rather long comment a few months ago about my thoughts for healthy living in general if you wanted to know my thoughts beyond CICO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681035
Was the Sinclair C5 30 years too early?
> Nothing to see here....In the absence of time pressure they could have let a contract to fully specify the work, then one to do it.

I agree that in this specific case, had the contractor come back and said "it will be $1 billion more," it would have been worth paying to avoid the destruction of the Central Valley.

The broader discussion is that this is avoidable. Two models abound in the private sector. For less time-sensitive situations, one has changeover processes [1]. For time-sensitive work, companies avoid like death being totally dependent on a single company.

The latter would require large changes in the way contracting is done in America. But it's not like nobody else in the world faces time-sensitive repairs. The defensiveness we, as Americans, have towards our system which shows clear and apparent pricing flaws is surprising.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15524807
Enfilades and General Enfilade Theory
There was a lot of excitement about C# support coming in v3.0 back in last month's discussion:

Godot Engine – Free and open-source 2D and 3D game engine | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15523416 (Sep 2017, 131 comments)
It’s basically drain cleaner (which becomes salty water as soon as it gets mixed with an acid), plus digested meat juice.
That more about managed care and managing ER outcomes like help desk tickets. The old fee for service models are going away as costs increase.

Medicare and Medicaid HMOs pay for “results”, not visits. So you need to either get admitted or get the hell out and don’t come back to the ERir they lose revenue.
I used to do prototypes and then throw them away or completely rewrite them. Now what I do normally is first define the interface I want to use with a small example snippet, then work on that. Of course this only works with projects where I know the direction slightly, other times I still go the prototype+redo route.
So their basic premise is a lie.... "We find you the lowest price"...

In fact they are finding the lowest prices, then trying to maximize the amount you pay for it.

Disgusting.
This comment is addressing weak arguments as if they are strong ones. Of course you are not going to create an artificial general intelligence by taking a machine-learning algorithm and adding more processing power. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of good reasons to be worried about AGI!

I mean, yes, I realize plenty of people seem to think that you can in fact do that, and it is worth pointing out to these people that they are wrong, but that is not an argument against the more general thesis that there is good reason to be be worried about AGI.
You're correct in observing that change-over processes are less-frequently implemented for time-sensitive work. I was making a broader point around our public-sector low-bid auction process.

For this type of work, the best process would avoid appointing a single contractor. Unfortunately, that would also require more expertise in the public officials allocating work, a concentration we find politically toxic in America.
Eh, your idea of embodiment is iffy. Computers can interact with an environment. Eventually computers will be far more able than humans to interact with environments. Humans are equipped with a very advanced set of input devices we call senses, but after that point we have to use technology to translate what we cannot perceive into information we can. You cannot see ultraviolet, you have to translate it into visual light, which is then translated into neural signals. A computer system directly, or indirectly connect with just about any sensor we can think of and directly manipulate that signal.
Susan's a great mind and I have had the pleasure of chatting with her in person, but there is definitely some historical revisionism going on here.

Travis created a bad Uber culture in general. He was done in not by Fowler specifically but the fruits of his failures as a leader blossoming into several parallel disasters of which Waymo was probably the major major fiasco of the bunch.
How is someone else doing this to her? I assume she allowed this interview to take place.
WiHack – program for hacking wi fi, crack wi fi password, wi fi networks
I'm waiting for the day my Linux browser agent string pays off. So far, I've only seen random sites refusing to work for no good reason.
That’s a quite peculiar read of the history. The real story of Korea is something more like:

-The United States propped up the corrupt and vicious right-wing ruler Syngman Rhee, who was responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings of his political opponents. And also not a real fan of democracy

-His reign of murder and repression created a context in which, Kim Il Sung, by opposing him, could build on his reputation as an Anti-Japanese occupation guerilla to become a populist hero.

-Who, in the imperial conquest by proxy battle known as the Cold War, then became the Chinese and Soviet’s man in the Korean Peninsula.

So neither side really fighting for or against the spread of democracy. Just their own interests. And everything is still a mess as a result!
23 Polynesians Convicted in Religious Witch-Hunt Murders (1990)
> and it's only after they have distinct subsidiaries that they can geo-diversify (as GOOG slowly is, and IBM has done).

First off, Google has lots of offices all over the country and world, although Mountain View is still by far the biggest one.

Secondly, what offices they have opened in the US are disproportionately (by headcount) in expensive cities like NYC, Seattle, Boston, etc. The only cheap city they have a significant number of devs in is Pittsburgh. So your theory fails here again.

Heck even looking at Europe, you know what the two biggest dev offices are for Google there? Zurich and London, two of the most expensive cities in Europe. Where's their German dev office? Oh it's in Munich, the most expensive city in the country.
> "We find you the lowest price"...

"We find you the lowest price (that we think you'll actually purchase)".

FTFY?
Even better: the more rules and processes you put in place to try to avoid/punish this, the harder it is to get the contract in the first place. Eventually, most companies decide it's not worth jumping through all the hoops you've put in place to avoid corruption, and you end up with a handful of entities which get every contract and face no meaningful competition to try to keep the bids down.
What enemy? The world benefits immensely from China no longer being hyper impoverished and no longer being a big negative drain on world aid. Now that China can fully support itself - which is something that is actually relatively recent, only occurring in the last 20 years - more global aid is available to help the remaining very poor nations, and China can contribute to that, accelerating the climb of the global median standard of living.

500 million of the world's poorest people still live in China. While they have a long ways to go yet, every bit of progress helps the rest of the world tremendously.
Going by industry gossip it is a very strong signal. Strong enough to be worth while even though they know customers hate it.
I miss those days when sitting in a cafe with rooted android phone, I we're able to mess up with peoples Facebook and VK accounts by sniffing traffik.
And, of course, the linkage between population growth and transit use could go the other way. Maybe more people are moving to Seattle because it has a good transit system (among other things.)
Wonderful , this summarized the capabilities of this HAss

> A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.

> Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously)

> Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices.

> Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.
It is most definitely a fair discussion to have, and the bidding/financing/contractual system for these projects really does need to change to have better incentives.

I just don't think your incentives would produce better outcomes, from my perspective it would make things worse.
Porcupine, a fast linearizability checker written in Go
Just because some might not use freedom wisely doesn’t mean it should be denied to anyone.
I think this is a sort of sleight of hand that preys upon people's inability to wrap their heads around large numbers.

I'm reminded of this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/505

It feels completely insane that our universe could be simulated by shuffling rocks around. And yet we know, incontrovertibly, that the rocks can do anything a modern CPU can. You just need a lot of rocks -- where "a lot" is not 1 billion, not even close. Scale is a helluva drug.
At some point in the next 5 years, I predict there will online services that will "proxy-shop" for you. They will specialize in building profiles (cookies, logins, etc) that get offered low prices, then use these to purchase products on your behalf. Perhaps a browser plugin, so that at the moment you go to check out on a product, you send the product's link to the service and they get it for you at a lower price.

Then retailers will attempt to bring legal challenges against them for breaking terms of service, that will be interesting...
Exporting global store and being able to import it anywhere in an application seems like a bad idea. The nice part about redux is that the store is dynamically injected into react components.

Now the action creators and react components that use action creators are not pure functions the predictability and testability of the application is lost.

It seems appropriate that the README does not contain a "how to test" section, which is a huge selling point to Redux. "Predictable" is also missing.

For sake the of "lite"ness we have lost two huge selling points to use redux.
Keep in mind if they're doing CDMA the power is dialed down to keep it uniform at the receiver(otherwise the code XOR doesn't work) so unless you're at the limits of reception it's probably not at 3w.

Agreed though, the power seems really low.
I was thinking Yucca Mountain.
Yes airplane crashes are complex, that's painfully obvious. In the case of an airline crash we don't say "well flying is complicated this is bound to happen" or otherwise make excuses for the pilot.

If we were as diligent with our police forces as we are with commercial airlines we wouldn't have as many bad cops.
>yet we don't run around screaming that automated printing has destroyed writing.

I disagree in part. There have been many complaints voiced about bots in modern digital book distribution producing tons of crap and flooding markets like amazon.com with junk. It doesn't take very many processes like this to produce a corpus of information larger than has been created by mankind. So in some sense of the word, bots have 'destroyed' writing by volume. Now that said, most of it will never be seen in a place where it causes interruption to shoppers or readers, as it will get filtered out by the distributors. That said, this makes a mess of unfiltered distributed systems of digital books.
> “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea?"

Why are people so worried about going to war with North Korea? There are concentration camps in North Korea. Are South Korean and American lives worth more than the lives of those in concentration camps? The USA tried to create a free Korea during the Korean War and failed because of China and Russia. We need to try again to clean up this mess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodok_concentration_camp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoeryong_concentration_camp
The phrase "get girls" is even itself misogynistic since it's already an objectifying phrase. That doesn't necessarily mean that the person using it otherwise deserves being judged and identified as a misogynist. But the judgment of Travis is probably based on a lot of other factors than that one phrase.
How would you feel if there was a drug that could save your child’s life, but you and your doctor were not allowed to be made aware of it?

And since Thalidomide hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from slow drug approvals.