skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comment got my gears turning about good ways to split up Uber in an anti-trust case. One possibility is to have Uber A provide dispatch as a service, while Uber B collects fares, disburses driver payments, and provides the front-end UI. Uber B could also set up whatever driver incentives they wanted. Uber A would be a regulated monopoly, and would have to allow other companies to compete with Uber B on its platform.

In this scenario, dispatch would basically be a public utility, and drivers could trust the algorithm not to cheat. I.e. since Uber B and its competitors would be running any driver incentives, Uber A wouldn't even know about it. (And legally shall not know such things.)

I realize this is a half-baked pipe dream, but an interesting thought experiment.
As a Québécois, I haven't seen much discussion about the effects of diluting Québec's shares in the plane. The article says our new stake is 19%, down from 49%. I feel we got kind of shafted in the deal, given we bought these shares at a valuation of ~5.5B (for 2.8B) and now Airbus gets a bigger share for free. I don't think this means good news for our investment.
Rasa Core kicks up the context for chatbots
3 Home Remedies Proven to Get Rid of Fine Lines and Wrinkles
People buy pain relief :)
It seems that Uber is frequently receiving bad press for practices that outrage a lot of people. The impression I get is most commenters on HN take issue with many of these practices. Yet at the same time, they seem to be one of the poster boys of the SV new economy. To me this seems at odds with the HN community. I'm curious if others find this as well.
Speculation: You were being downvoted because software types often express ideas that can be summed up as business is easy and the people doing the business aspects aren't important. They seem to think that everyone and anyone can do it and, when they hear success stories as examples, it reinforces those ideas.

A good example is some of the comments that software folks make about the sales department.

They are different skillsets and people have varied abilities in each. The business aspect is not actually easy. It is also not always done well. The software end isn't always done well, either.

My guess would be that is why you were being downvoted. I notice a number of votes are emotional in nature. They aren't based on logic. I see some that are most easily explained as, "I don't want to know." The comment is factual, not confrontational, and topical. The vote is still negative.

Meh... I don't mind it when it happens to me. I have karma to spare and don't actually make comments for the points. I say what I feel needs to be said and try to stick mostly within the guidelines. (I do meander off topic sometimes.)

But, no... I don't comment for the points. I comment for the replies and thoughts. They are usually quite brilliant and insightful.
Everyone wants to strike startup gold, so selling shovels seems like a decent idea to me.

True, the customer base isn’t stable... but there’s a founder born every second, if you know what I mean.
Option types for references need be no more expensive than a null pointer check, and I believe this is how they are implemented in Rust. If a dynamic check is not necessary, then you simply do not use an Option type.
Why would they offer this rather than just an "Hey! it's going to be a busy weekend and we want extra cars on the road. Earn $349 and get paid 33% extra" promo? There's no need to take the $115 if the driver can't lose. Let's not pretend that Uber needs the $115 for cashflow purposes.
> not have to wait for NSA leak

soon we'll learn this whole project a plant by NSA, complete with 10 months spent fabricating the commit history.
The best expression I've heard is "As CEO, I'm the Money Guy". Whether it be selling product or raising money, the #1 job of CEO is to do whatever is necessary to keep the coffers flowing.
I don't think we'll have a lack of volume. Global incomes continue to rise and push demand higher. Often times developing economies' growth comes at the expense of developed but on the whole it's net positive.
yeah, I guess my point is that maintaining internet and general office stuff is not "free", in that it's costing you your time or money. I don't spend much time on office stuff, but if the office is just software engineers, it's actually pretty expensive for anyone to spend any time on office stuff.

I am not saying it's more expensive than wework, but it is damn sure more expensive than just looking at rent + monthly bills.
Kevin Murphy wrote the Bayes Net Toolbox which got me started in the area.

Anyway, this paper is really neat. As far as I can tell, it's a big step towards linking theories in Bayesian networks and neural networks.
https://puri.sm/ is their website and should have more there.
Most of those Edison 170V DC products saw adaptation. (Their net service proved some adaptability.) Doorbells that offer both stealth and wireless stealth rolls and declared their adherence to ADnD (WoTC) v4.4 and a major faction (Lawful Wyrmic Faction? Fire Zero (Adherent, Vacancy)) sound a bit better right there. Company changing to DnD v. 5.2? Escrows a key (to open base.h ROM, to a VM, something with relevance.)
Tell HN: Please dont brick the app
An old friend of mine died of cancer on Sunday, alone in a Thai government hospital, with no family or friends around him, in a language he didn't really understand, it sad ending, it was not a dignified way to go.

His only contact with the others in world in recent months has been WhatsApp which I setup when I visited him earlier in the year. He had expected to live several months but things took a turn for the worse and rapidly deteriorated over a few days. WhatsApp the buggers put an arbitrary time limit on the app between updates so he was locked out - confused and desperate (coupled with the morphine), I guess he had enough mentally.

I presume his phone was never updating due to storage being near limit - tbf his phone was a mess and he was a technophobe, and since he never saved contacts just sent off the number I guess there was no record of his contacts in his main phone. I have in phone in my possession now, but my new number was not there for example, he had tried to call my old number via non Internet on the 8th. I've managed to sort out the hospital, the death certificates, family wishes, and temple send off, but I'm sure he would not of wanted to leave things in this way.

App devs - We're not all in 1st world countries surrounded by friends and family, with techies to troubleshoot. Please don't brick your communication apps on a time limit, maybe disable emoji or video calls or some non core functionality, but lets not go nuts and block the whole app for the sake of adding telemetry, ads, or more politically correct emojis. This wasn't a protocol change or anything else afaik which makes me quite angry. end of rant
I didn't downvote you, but if I had, it would be because while you're right that building sales and marketing is difficult and doing so successfully is certainly admirable, another fundamentally important part of creating a successful software business is building a successful product. I suspect your downvoters don't believe that Mongo has actually done that part.
I think it should be easy to use, not complex and unintuitive. The best way to know whether your UX sucks at early stage is to ask a few friends, both technical and non-technical, evaluate your products.
No Proof of Work Required (Cryptocurrency for Open Source)
To be fair, Average Joe's pension fund was probably invested in one of the VCs that who cashed out at the IPO too. So Average Joe likely still benefits at the end of the day.
Site doesn't load in Firefox Focus on Android.

DevDocs is running inside an Android WebView. Some features may not work properly.
I'd argue while perhaps they are examples of brutalist functionality, the wikipedia, reddit and HN offer a very nice UX and a simple, easy to learn UI.

HN/Wiki/Reddit don't: break the back button, take forever to load 1000 JS/CSS files, have broken "infini-scrolling", or even break when JS is disabled (well, reddit kinda does now).

Compare that to the majority of over-engineered SPA-style webpages that employed many, many front-end engineers and UX designers, and Wikipedia, Reddit, HN as well as old-school Gmail and FB start looking amazing.

Man oh man do I miss old Gmail... that was a great interface. I exclusively use FB on mobile, no-js mode.

Web brutalism should be the new hotness.
Idk, we seem to live fine with thousands of fiat currencies, stocks, bonds, and derivatives, all non-pairwise-fungible. Markets could make it so that you'd just buy utility tokens when you need them, and only investors would need to care about owning equity-type tokens
Grad students aren't grad students forever, right? So it must be darn hard to have union membership turn over.

Grads today in the union will leave in a few years and not stay decades.

Unions i know work when lives in the same job are represented. And contracts last 4-6 yrs.

Not sure i see a chance for long term benefit.
No, it's actually any aerobic exercise. Running, cycling, swimming, etc. Anything where you are breathing hard for your next breath and can't think about anything else but breathing.
I mean, that clip is kind of the tip of the iceberg with ESR's published record here. And it's not just anti-black and anti-Latino racism; here's another choice example:

https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032

We could go on for quite some time about women if we really wanted. Or we could just look to the front page of his blog, where he's posted a long, arduous defense of "casting couch" sexual harassment.
I also recommend to look at Embark.
I find it more mature and well-designed than truffle.
The products page of the linked article: https://puri.sm/products/ . That Librem 11 looks tempting...
In C/C++, you quite often end up in situations when some other condition implies that a pointer is nonnull. In Rust, the equivalent code with Option would require an unnecessary dynamic check.
That example seems so contrived that it's difficult for me to see it representing reality in a meaningful way. It may be too simple to be useful.

In reality, that tenth widget still gets produced. They hire someone else to replace the "UBI recipient" or else run the production line slightly faster so nine people make ten widgets, or else automate and fire all ten employees, and make twenty widgets a year. Nothing in a real economy is that zero-sum. Value which only exists in potentia and which may as well be created by other means cannot reasonably be said to be "destroyed." Something which never existed can't be destroyed.

UBI just decouples a person's ability to work with their ability to live at a subsistence level, it doesn't prevent them from working.
That was the case at VCU and every other state school I looked at in VA. Only for Science/Engineering though. All other subjects had very few if any TA/RA positions and a ton of people competing to get them.

About 10 years ago the stipends were around 25-35k/year. Plenty to live off of in Richmond or Charlottesville.
Due to severe consequences to victims (such as the harassment and suicide mentioned in TFA), calling the police may be against the victim's wishes and harmful to them.
Not zero, but you might care to look up David Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages.

The basic problem is that labour (as with several other inputs) can for a time operate below its long-term subsistence costs, by effectively drawing down its accrued capital. Doing so results in a net degredation of total productive output.

In conditions in which there is a ready supply of replacement labour, this is not a concern of the employer, unless those costs are somehow internalised.

Gregory Clarke (and many others) note that in the 19th century, cities such as London had natural reproduction rates below the replacement rate. Cities sustained (and indeed increased) their populations through net in-migration. Excpected life expectancy of a newly-arrived labourer was often only a few years, but wages were higher than could be commanded in the surrounding countryside.

See also: Backward-S bending supply curves.
Retrofitting anything into anything always results in warts. Moral of the story: design things right, right from the beginning.
I guess the problem with surge pricing is that it isn't guaranteed in advance, so drivers make other plans and then aren't around to pick up the extra rides?

And they're taking advantage of loss aversion too, not just desire for higher income.
I did not downvote the parent comment, but I did downvote you, because I think your comment stereotypes "software types" in an unfair way. It is possible to both have a lot of respect for the difficulty of building the business side of an organization and for the folks who can do it well, and to think that it is unwise to build a business based mostly on sales and marketing without focusing enough on the quality of the product itself.
If you've been following to #MeToo campaign or if you ask a woman, it is normal (in the sense that it's common, not that it's inevitable or acceptable).
This is regulation. Someone has to extend the effort to figure out which ads were political or not.
How to Change Your Unsatisfactory Trading Profits
Apollo 13 Real-time: Real-time playback of Apollo 13's audio logs
OPen source blogging
i think it's basically why the black death raised wages for its survivors
Pollution kills more people than all wars and violence
Kids? Just say no
Florida Man Awarded $37,500 After Cops Mistake Glazed Doughnut Crumbs for Meth
We've used Haskell to make a VR Linux Desktop prototype called Simula: https://github.com/SimulaHS/Simula
MH370: Malaysia in deal with private search firm to find missing plane
Disaster recovery like recovering servers from crashes/recovering 'lost' databases?
Please no mixers. The AI/ML/CS people should start their own different, better approach.
"Multi-tenancy"

That term is new to me but after reading a few descriptions I think that CouchDB 2.0 is designed in a way that may provide those capabilities.

It has built-in authentication and uses "Users" and "Roles" and "Design Documents" that provide controls and methods to create and access data on a specific database.

http://docs.couchdb.org/en/2.1.0/

You might want to look into PouchDB.js as well as the CouchDB Docs.

https://pouchdb.com
Debunking misinformation about the Pixel 2 XL’s display
That's just a problem with ordering. If a condition implies a non null pointer then a non null pointer can imply the condition as well. This is true unless the condition being false does not guarantee a null pointer, in which case the condition is not useful.
If some condition implies multiple non null pointers then the option type can be defined on a tuple of references
You summed up the 21st century. In a nutshell.
Thanks I'll need to check it out for my next project
I actually gambled on this one. I'd noticed the hype and read around this morning.

I didn't go in that big, but we will see. I bought 700 shares at $29.12, sometime around noon. I was a bit busy so didn't pay much attention to this thread, but they closed at a bit over $32.00.

I haven't yet set a mark to sell them. I do have it set to notify me I'd they go below 29.00 and will sell them all if they go below $24.00. Ideally, I'll keep the shares for a full year, at minimum.

I figured 20k isn't too much to risk, though I technically risk less than that because I will sell if they go below $24.

So, we shall see... We shall see... It is one of the rare times when I am betting against the folks on the tech forums. The commentary seems to be largely negative, concerning the software itself - I've never personally used it. I'm betting that the hype train will continue, regardless of it not being perfect in every way.
Some startups do very well. Uber, Lyft, Square Cash/Venmo, Yelp, those really do solve problems many of us have/had.

Then a few tech startups doing analytics I had some experience with, probably overpromised (?? perhaps it was my fault) what their engine could do. Requests are often in backlog and can take many months to roll out, which by then contract renewal is up.
Sorry to be harsh and disregard your legitimate content completely but it is misguided, it lacks the most important word: Sales
University of Chicago is private, right? So this falls under Federal purview (unionization issues at state schools are under state jurisdiction). With the NLRB in the current administration, I can't imagine a friendly ruling towards the graduate students when the university administration's inevitable appeal boils up.
I know I'm late to the party here, but I love Statik
(https://github.com/thanethomson/statik) for this.
Also, he's not a good programmer.
I've had his schtick figured out for decades, and it's very tired and never changes. The whole "Blacks are lazy" fiasco was Russ unsuccessfully attempting to emulate ESR, the highest complement he could pay to his bro. Which is why ESR defended him so exuberantly. It was an orgy of narcissistic supply.

ESR's schtick: He's always trying to show off how intelligent he is by making a totally outrageous asinine statement he knows isn't true and is totally offensive, and then trying to prove he's so clever that he CAN justify it through mental tricks, verbal gymnastics and gerrymandered taxonomies. He does it again and again. Every one of his posts is just like that.

And his minions eat it up, because he appeals directly and systematically to their prejudices and hatred.

So technically, in a certain sense, no, he's not racist, because he doesn't believe a fucking thing he says. He's something much worse than racist: Eric the Flute is a Pied Piper of racism, someone who feeds and thrives from other people's racism, sexism and hatred.

Hmm, can you think of anyone else who's mastered this technique?
Hi @anishathalye, thanks for your https://github.com/anishathalye/porcupine. It’s a great project! Would you like to help me to check whether our model check is right or not with Porcupine? That would be highly appreciated!
> are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create

Isn't this what "their clients often have no other choice" means?
There's the option of reducing that exposure to a minimum limited extent. To the extent that this is auditable, verifiable, and based on well-established procedures, it may be an acceptable risk.

This includes encrypting unencrypted messages, after arrival, to the user's own key(s).

Keep in mind that data security consists of numerous elements:

* Access.

* Encryption-in-flight.

* Encryption-at-rest.

* Encryption-to-client.

* Rates of transfer or exfiltration. This has numerous elements, one of which I refer to as the Pennyworth limit. Bruce Wayne has a butler who is privy to Wayne's innermost secrets. But he is not also privy to the secrets of all of Gotham. And even at maximum data transmission rate, can only reveal a few hundred words a minute of information, on the order of a megabyte or so per day (in textual form). Our electronic devices and systems have far more information, in far more detail, on far more people, available at far higher rates, and for the most part, can be tapped with absolutely no awareness by the subject of the information revealed.

* An "entire mailbox" is only a few hundreds of MB or GB, and arrives incrementally. Since reading information client-side requires transmission of that data in any regard, the information is already client-side. There are now microSD devices with capacity approaching or exceeding 1 TB and above. Storage itself is not a limitation.

Unencrypted email can be indexed, the indexes encrypted, and transmitted to the client device.

I'm not saying that the technical considerations here are simple, but the costs of failing to address them, quite literally the future of liberal democracy, are too high to not do so.
Name: Simula

Web address: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Description: VR Linux Desktop prototype.

Category: VR, Linux

Platform/Technology: Haskell, Linux

Source code: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Comments: We are almost finished with a prototype that should work with the HTC Vive. The project is open-sourced and we're looking for contributors.

Contact Author: george.w.singer@gmail.com
> also they were Yale

Depends what you are studying. Their CS department is notoriously shoddy (I know the Yale undergrads were up in arms about this a few years back).
I have not noticed this as I am probably too used to it, but I tend to agree that using Roman numerals in this day and age doesn't make much sense and should be avoided (outside art anyway).
I'll make a shameless plug for my side project, IQ boost. The first Dual N-Back iPhone app. I launched it about 2 weeks after the app store opened.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iq-boost/id286574399?mt=8
Maybe they do need the cash.
In cities like Bangalore, getting self-leased office space for an early stage startup is a nightmare. Either you have to take up individual houses converted as offices (borderline illegal) or you have to settle for crappy office spaces in god forsaken locations.
Even for established companies, managing office real estate is a nightmare. For instance, Microsoft had leased some office space in the heart of the city and even they had difficulty expanding and finding appropriate offices in the vicinity. (They have now taken up space at WeWork as a makeshift arrangement).
So yeah, while WeWork seems like an expensive real estate play, they do fill a market need.
That's why rent-producing goods are subject to rents taxation. See the land taxes suggested by Smith, Ricardo, and George.

Colleges and other shared-expense systems (see also: healthcare, military spending, public spending generally) present and pose other challenges, but they are not the same as the situation as applies to housing, specifically.

You don't give builders credits to build houses. You tax them for the potential revenues of a given quantity of land. Since land is nonfungible, the consequence is to both develop undeveloped lots, and to increase the density of utilisation of developed losts.
But the front brake is normally controlled by the left brake lever, and signals are supposed to be given with the left hand. I've seen it argued that since most people are right-handed, and the front brake does most of the work and therefore deserves the most careful modulation, the usual practice is backwards: the right level should be for the front brake. I guess this is another reason. It makes sense to me, I guess, but not so much that I've actually bothered to swap the cables on my bike :-)

Anyway, in the wet it isn't always safe to use only the front brake.
Ahh, gotcha. All good :)
I think that Uber is now a case of throwing good money after bad. The company is clearly going to fail, but so much venture money is at risk they are treated as if they're successful, or going to be successful. The longer the charade continues, the worse it's going to be in the end.
Good point, I have a B2C bias.
Gruber is another one of those.
> I mean, it won't change your personality or anything like that.

I was on MDMA in 2000 when I finally saw through my own bigotry. I had been raised with a particular set of values about a group due to the prejudice of a parent. I have always attributed that personal breakthrough to the drug. This still might have occurred naturally, albeit at a slower rate, but it shattered my worldview in a very positive way in one night.

I could go on about personality changes that were directly linked to another chemical, but the point is that just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened to someone else.
Sure! Sent you an email.
A company is NOT all about maximizing profits. But even if they were there is a difference between maximizing short term profits and long term profits
Thanks. Seems they did some good work indeed. Though it takes time before they get back the trust they lost over this.