skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By that measure, yes, I do think most of the major metros in the US are corrupt. It is a by-product of the loss of genuinely productive jobs in the country, and the rise of the "jobs" that had to replace them, because as a nation, the U.S. is violently allergic to any form of "unearned" welfare system. So the largest portion of the welfare system takes the form of pointless, overpaid, make-work government jobs. The military-industrial complex is similar, providing jobs for people leaving the military with no experience applicable towards ordinary businesses. It's welfare for veterans, but they have to work for it, so that's okay.

It impacts ordinary citizens by raising their taxes and making the siting of production facilities in that locale even less attractive to companies, which tends to compound the problem. Real jobs leave. Fake jobs spring up. Companies that offer real jobs get squeezed harder to pay for the fake jobs. When they finally reach a breaking point, they leave and take the jobs with them. Spiral further down and repeat.

This gets thrown around on HN a lot, but the root cause of the problem is the implicit and seemingly unassailable assumption that everyone has to work in order to eat. People actually get angry at the idea that someone might get the minimum portion of life's necessities without sweating on them first.

Until that is addressed, no city in the US is totally safe for a business founded to do productive work, and the safest cities are those where enough new businesses are founded to employ all the people who would otherwise be forced to do make-work jobs to survive. And I think that's why people want to found companies in places that are already considered to be friendly to startups. The tightness of the labor market is not a bug; it's a feature. It means that more of your taxes go to infrastructure and vital services, and less to stealth welfare.

The best place to start a business is one that doesn't need for you to start it there.
SF definitely needs more underground transit. I recently found out that it takes on average 5 minutes less to take a bus from the inner sunset to forest hill to catch a K/L/M inbound than taking the N-Judah.
My experience with COBOL was on Stratus computers running the VOS operating system. This was a better environment than mainframes, but I'm still ambivalent about the language.
Well, yes. They are insane.

Infinity is a rubbish idea, by the way. I've given it much thought and concluded it is best to just not think about it. Cantor was a lunatic, and I'm not entirely certain that infinity isn't a causal factor.

Don't get me started. It doesn't end well. ;-)

Eventually I go off on the absurdity of 'true random' and our presumption to know the differences between it and unpredictability. It's hubris and madness, all the way down.

They really should stop teaching mathematics by rote. If you're familiar with my posting history, I very seldom say 'should.'
Maybe too expensive for something like 4chan. But those fees might make sense if you were wanting to use the blockchain as a form of proof or tamper-resistance.

For instance, how Keybase uses the bitcoin blockchain: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
This is an interesting comment though ...

> We believed that the veterinarian is the most trusted partner for a pet parent (vs. the walker, grooming, trainer) and that owning the vet relationship would create the most value. We have since learned that more value may lie in the networks that have higher frequency (i.e. walking, grooming, boarding, etc.)

I wonder whether it would have worked to develop trust at walking, grooming, etc, and then try to upsell to vet services?
I’ve been practicing TDD for 6 years and this is exactly what I ended up doing. It’s a fantastic way to program.

My leaves are either pure functions (FP languages) or value objects that init themselves based on other value objects (OOP languages). These value objects have no methods, no computed properties, etc. Just inert data.

No mocks and no “header” interfaces needed.

On top of that I sprinkle a bunch of UI tests to verify it’s all properly wired up.

Works great!
Catalan Republic (2017)
No matter what you think Europe needs, how would you argue that the Catalonians shouldn't have a right to self determination? If, for the sake of argument, a clear majority of them want to be (fully) sovereign from Spain, do you think Madrid has a right to suppress that? And one step up, do you think Brussels has?

Do you have the same opinion about Kosovo?
I doubt the people who make millions a year pay 50%. Those people tend to be good at structuring much of their income as capital gains, which is taxed much lower. Even tax on regular income tops out at about 43% including payroll taxes. It could go higher if you include other taxes such as sales taxes or state income taxes.
It won't happen because no one really wants it. You need only look at San Jose and LA, both of which grew by swallowing neighoring municipalities, to realize bigger is definitely not better
Are you suggesting the fact that there is not much PHP work around means that the career prospects of the field are in decline? One language is not indicative of the whole, this comment is not evidence either. And besides you seem to be assuming both that legacy work does not happen and that people can't adapt. I know both a fresh out of school person who does cobol and a mid 50s JavaScript UX person who started on punch cards.
You have magically inflated 10% "yes/no" plus 5% "no" and saying that means 20% "yes" (which is a stretch) ... and then extrapolated that to a majority somehow? Given the turnout then if we were saying "this is a definitive mandate for independence" then yes that would be a ridiculous statement ... but suggesting the opposite is absolutely preposterous.
Identity Politics: How Ethereum Could Save Us from Fake News
Since nobody managed to ELI5 this one:

The tire wants to go in a straight line (inertia).

When a tire bounces over a bump, the springs push it back down onto the road. The heavier the wheel and the arms, the longer the tire has poor (or no!) contact with the road. No contact = no handling.

It's like hydroplaning on a dry road. Scary shit. Potentially fatal on a curve.
Why Go Is Not Good
Researchers Unveil Tool to Debug ‘Black Box’ Deep Learning Algorithms
I shouldn't snark, but I'm making a serious point, which is that we've already tried retrenching in code quality improvement (and nothing else), and have already empirically seen that approach fail.

There are architectural components to our security problems (we still run systems with 1980s security models) and that needs to change.

By the way, I have no idea what "prince of bandages" means.
Financial business logic is not a great use case, approximately no one uses it for that. Almost all of the interest in BTC/ETH is driven by speculation and greed, which is a shame as it's a whole new computing paradigm.
> Or to sell VPN Services?

That seems to be a major aspect. There are hundreds of VPN services. They compete on many dimensions, such as speed, security, not retaining any logs, and the number of server locations. And some of them have insane numbers of server locations.

Anyway, I've been look it this issue for a while, using ping services (such as asm.ca.com, maplatency.com and ping.pe). For HMA and VyprVPN, only about half of the servers seem to be located where claimed. And HMA claims to have one in North Korea ;)

Some
I avoid meetings if I can but if there is no agenda I flat out refuse or volunteer to prepare the agenda myself. I will not step foot in the room without one.
Would it make any sense to use something like tor.nytimes.com to redirect to their hidden service on the other hand? To allow people to be sure they're hitting the correct endpoint on Tor. If you're on TOR you typically have access to the rest of the internet, at least depending on setup.
And maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful. For example, if a vehicle senses black ice in a certain part of the road, it can pass that information to other cars so they know to slow down when going over the same part of the road. So something like Waze but for road conditions.
I'm saying that 24% yearly growth is quite achievable just on the strength of Internet growth. It's likely that they already have slowed down to match Internet growth (I would bet that this happened around 2013, which was when I observed saturation in the percentage of above-the-fold commercial results that are ads), but that this rate is still high enough that Wall Street's estimates are low.
About time.

I build autonomous/ADAS testbed cars in Detroit and it's astonishing the stuff that the California cars get flustered by. LIDAR is baffled by snow, RADAR sensors get packed with slush if they're mounted too low, etc.
I read what you wrote, and I read the whole thread, and the context.

You brought up human rights in the context of this discussion more than once, what else are we supposed to take from that, than that you think 'human rights' are remotely relevant to the topic of banning nazis from reddit, which they aren't.
If you can mask anything then can you use XSS to get any proof you want? Doesn't even have to be code, since block chains may activate based on certain text being on the site.
Hitting the brakes in a 2500 kg car at 100 mph generates a megawatt of braking energy (100 * 1607/3600 * 2500 * 9.8 * 0.9 = 984 kW). Plausibly sized hub motors can't handle this even momentarily.

Brake rotors have less thermal mass, but can get red-hot without damage.
Here's something that was released fairly recently by my alma mater - IIT Bombay

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.02855
How realistic is the idea of creating commmunity/neighborhood level wireless networks to sidestep anti-consumer manipulation?

Anyone tried to do so?
Ask HN: Best Mouse for programming
Hi All,

The Apple Magic Mouse 1 I have been using for about 4 years is wearing out and I'm planning to get a new mouse ASAP.

Any suggestions?

I don't play games at all. I really just need it for typical work. I work on a Macbook pro in a docking station at my desk most of the time.

I'm a developer that typically VIM locally and also manages several windows machines using remote desktop. I get a bit of Carpel Tunnel pain here and there but not too bad.

Thanks
We're actually saying the same thing: there is no serious community of VC funding in Chicago. I'm just saying that's not because Chicago isn't a capital/finance center.
Caltech opens a drone lab, with big ideas to improve how robots work with humans
How can you so blindly oversimplify a problem and then act like the rest of the world is incompetent for not solving it already?

Snow is not just increased visual noise. Just off the top of my head, with no experience in self-driving cars and limited experience in computer vision:

Snow (on the ground and street and curbs) is a vastly lower-contrast visual environment where numerous traditionally distinct features of the landscape are covered by a blanket of white.

Snow is a more dangerous and difficult-to-stop-in environment, with totally different physical dynamics. Recognizing pedestrians (and their intentions), road blocks, debris, etc. is probably already a challenging problem, and with snow it's not only more difficult, it needs to be done from a much farther distance to give adequate stopping time.

Along with snow there are issues with recognizing icy patches and other especially low traction sections on the road and adjusting control inputs accordingly.

I can't tell if you've never driven in snow or never even attempted a basic computer vision or robotics task in your life, or both.
Announcing Taggart – A Markup Generation Tool for Elixir
Everyone I know who bought it at $10 sold it when it was $20, thinking they had the steal of the century.
He never asked for this, these augmentations.
VmWare player is free and has been working perfectly for a decade.

HyperV should be alright but I don't think it comes with the desktop license for Windows 7+.

VirtualBox never caught up with VmWare when it comes to supported features and stability.

Vagrant is a wrapper around virtualbox so it suffers from the same issues. They could never use VmWare because the free edition doesn't provide API for integrations.

Docker on Windows is totally experimental. They ported to Windows for the PR and next round of funding. Don't expect anything to work.
I wonder why they didn't try to pivot towards selling all that in-house software they built out to clinics directly. I'm sure some of it would have been useful. Also, presumably pet health records wouldn't have the same constraints of HIPAA, so it would be easier to scale and use a generic subscription SaaS model than if they had been making a human medical record company.

I can't speak to the quality of most available vet software today, but as a client, I would love to have my pets medical info in one place. Especially because I have relationships with both a local, general vet, and a specialist after my older cat got diagnosed with lymphoma. It was hard to even get those clinics on the same page at first since they were faxing ultrasounds around, and I'm still not sure if all records through. I have no way to verify. At best, I'll receive a PDF after a visit with some test results. But I don't have a comprehensive set of records online anyhwhere.

Maybe that space is already saturated or vet clinics don't have much incentive to pay for it. Still, I switched to a doctor with a better online records system (not based on the system alone though) and it definitely makes me happier with the service and less likely to switch again.
Thanks for the additional feedback.

I agree that folks who commonly send large files probably already have found a good solution for it. There are a variety out there.

In my own case, I sometimes send large files but at least as often ask someone else to send /me/ a large file, typically someone who doesn't often send large files. That turns into a phone call in which I explain to them how they can sign up for a service to send me the file. Sometimes the file ends up coming on a USB stick.

Seeing that Randall Munroe had even made fun of my struggle was the last straw and I decided to build something :)

Thanks for the link. It was a delightful read.
IMO a better (or at least positive) solution would be for these huge bay area companies - especially those on the peninsula - to spread out there offices along the south peninsula and into south bay. We should be adding commercial into these residential areas so that everyone (in tech) is not traveling to the same region from all over the south bay or SF. Live where you work! This IMO would alleviate the traffic exodus that occurs in basically 2 directions every day. Put more companies in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Campbell, San Jose downtown (especially since it is fed by light rail). Stop putting offices in these "office/commercial zones" where there is NO public transportation. Why does everyone need to be in one small section of the bay area?

Optionally if we are committed to this current "everything must be in one region" mentality lets get together as communities (Mtn View, San jose, campbell, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, etc) and get the rail built now. One of the biggest stressors in this area (outside housing costs) is the traffic and aged infrastructure. Frankly its easily solved - if this supposed "progressive" area would do what needs to be done. Yes it would cost, but it would make daily life so much better for everyone.

Yes, I know its more complex than this (one issue is NIMBYs and those that bought in early to housing and need/want it to go up), but how can our children live in this area and make it home in its current state? Humans seem very short sighted.

(sorry for the overuse of quotes and my possibly incoherent rant :) )
Are these benchmarks unusual to anyone else? Things like changing the color of all the black pixels in a bitmap simultaneously and performing correlations on historical rainfall data. Is it because this technology is more suitable for certain types of computations?
Smooth Leader or Sharp Follower? Playing the Mirror Game with a Robot
There never was a black people count for 3/5 of white people.

It was “states that have slavery get to count 3/5 of their enslaved population when determining the representation the free population gets in Congress (and, hence, also it's voting power in Presidential elections.)”

It's actually worse than black people counting as 3/5 of a white person; its more like slaveholders counting as 1 + (slaves held × 3) / 5 people.
> Catalonia, more so than Estonia, has a distinct culture, including a language which has, at points, been illegal to write, teach, or even speak publicly on their own land. Their ties to Spain are a result of a fascist dictator who managed to largely avoid WWII and continue his reign until he died of natural causes, with his formed empire still intact.

I'm sorry, but those things are simply untrue. Estonia does have a completely different language than Russian, and Estonians are culturally also different than whatever the rest of the URSS was (indeed, one of the largest problems Moscow had in URSS times was keeping together such a collection of disparate cultures). Regarding Catalonian ties to Spain, they very much predate Franco, by several hundred years.
Along the same vein, worth checking out the archives of Alan Lomax. He spent 70 years collecting oral and folk music recordings across America, the Caribbean and the UK. Now in the Library of Congress[0]. Some of his recordings are famously sampled on Moby's Play album.

[0] https://www.loc.gov/folklife/folkcat.html
Even IF there was a desire among politicians to fix the transportation issues in San Francisco I doubt they'd find a means to do so. It would cost a ton of money and congress has no idea where to get that money from.

The middle class is taxed to capacity. When ~30-40% of your paycheck is taxes (including federal), and another 30-40% is exorbitant rent costs, you're left feeling quite squeezed. I myself for example, simply mark NO on all tax supported programs on the ballot, regardless of their merit.

It sucks because many of those programs are so desperately needed. But asking me to raise my taxes any further is a non-starter. If you include property tax and sales tax in your estimation of how much you're getting taxed the number is astonishing. Yet look around and witness what that buys - failing infrastructure, skyrocketing housing prices, terrible roads, healthcare prices spiraling out of control, an educational system in decline, the list goes on, and on...

It's not that I have an "every man for them self" perspective, it's just that I have believe there are deeper issues with our country that we can't tax ourselves out of.
Secure Payment Without Leaving a Trace
Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Public Key Pinning (in Chromium)
The issue is that on many hybrid laptops the nvidia card is wired to the display but the built in intel chipset isn't wired to the display or only wired to the HDMI port.
> And maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful.

I've made this suggestion before, but all commenters remarked about the risks of trusting another car, trusting another signal, hackers, script kiddies, and other malicious agents. The safest inter-car communication was determined to be adaptive cruise control.
It sounds like they didn't really research their industry deeply enough - because recurring revenue to veterinary providers comes from from agriculture. Who is going to need more vet support -- a homeowner who owns a cat or a dog or two, or a hobby farmer with 6 horses and a few goats, even ranches with livestock? In particular if you add on the non-medical services that small farms tend to need done a few times a year, but the new hobby farmers of the world haven't yet picked up the skills/tools to do it -- Disbudding goats, shearing sheep, etc. In particular if the business model already is based on home visits, the small ag market just makes more sense.
Do you know the history of spain and the civil war?

Even if not, don't you think it makes a difference for an area under spanish fascist rule, if most of the residents are pro spanish or if they are against it??
And proprietary driver users have the gall to reward Nvidia for their behavior by giving them hundreds of dollars for their GPUs, then come to me and ask me to deal with their bullshit for free. Well, fuck you, too. Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase.
Waymo recently released a large "safety report" in which it discusses the sensor suite.

https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way...
I experimented with this some. When you think about the costs of scaling and managing a database, the costs to post might not be so bad.
This is a bit beyond my knowledge of TCP/IP, however, does this support Putin's assertion that hackers can make an attack appear to come from Russia when they could be based somewhere else? How much work do you have to do to make it that your IP address is from somewhere credibly in some other country?
“Current events make a lot more sense once you accept that demons literally exist & are actively roaming the Earth“
Time to find out how well autonomous cars will deal with potholes
Sounds like a situation where the Byzantine Generals yet again rear their ugly head.
Ask HN: Can a startup succeed with terrible code?
I am the 10th employee and 3rd fulltime software developer at a startup which has so far seen some success. We have regular revenue from around 10 customers (a few of whom are fortune whatever-hundred), we have just gotten a small grant from the state we are located in and we are in talks with multiple VC funds, and have been attempting to push back our initial rounds because we believe our valuation is steadily increasing. The other two devs have been here since the beginning, and I just joined in July. I have about 3 years of professional experience, and in my opinion, our codebase is garbage from top to bottom. Adding or fixing any feature is a monumental task requiring collaboration between all three of us, and there are sections I don't bother touching without asking questions first. Furthermore, any request to refactor is mostly rebuffed by the fact that it doesn't add immediate value to the users we are beholden to for our immediate survival. How common is this? Should I jump ship, or will any other startup be just as bad? Do successful startups have good code, or is it all just about the final result for users?

Tl;Dr Do most startups which get funded/bought manage to produce good code, despite the pressure to produce features?
No, you put that Vagrantfile with provisioner installing your dotfiles into $HOME/.vagrant.d/ folder. Every time vagrant creates or starts any vm it will sort of "extend" its configuration by reading $HOME/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile (if it exists).
You are also forgetting the slow transaction times that occur in a public blockchain.
Ideal for parents = remote work without being strictly bound to specific hours. That's the only way I can see it being ideal
“How you get rich matters...”

Peter Thiel. The Bushes. Bill Gates. George Soros. Warren Buffett. IBM. Bayer.