skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where are you getting your demographic info for SNAP from?
This is synthesizing well with me.
In fact that's where I found it from!
That's not too bad.

Not Amazon, but a recent experience I had. I wanted to order a kit from Vex Robotics. Cost of the kit was $80. Shipping from the US was $150. Supposedly it's available from a Vex reseller in Thailand so I contacted them and they quoted $190 for the $80 kit with a one month delivery time. So they are just ordering it from the US and having it shipped at a somewhat lower cost. I am not desperate for the kit so its a nonstarter for me. I can almost certainly find a serviceable substitute from a Chinese supplier who will ship to Thailand at a fraction of the cost.
> Just send an email

Are you going to send it yourself, and miss out on the archetypal secretarial duty of dictation?
Try google image searching for the following terms:

"american inventors"
"european people art"
"white couple"
"white man and white woman"
"european history people"
"white woman with children"
There is an international agreement to deliver postage paid parcels from another country if the postage was paid in the starting nation. Some countries benefit more if they send more packages than if they receive. China govt subsidies the post in China and allows cheap or free shipping to manufacturers as it encourages manufacturing. So in part your domestic mail carrier absorbs some of the cost and the Chinese government gets the rest.
I remember when the New Space guys and gals would laugh at Elon Musk for spending > 100M, comparing him to old-space.

I think the lesson is that to do space on the cheap you need 100M, not 10M.
Finally, a nice uncontroversial subject amenable to logic and data.

You either believe:

1. That a person is good for the country because they work, earn, spend and contribute to productivity.

2. They are taking a job that would have otherwise gone to an American, and are transferring money from laborers to the corporation.

It seems to be a matter for economic theory. What do studies show? Does a worker produce as many high paying jobs as they displace?

It seems odd that we aren't pulling out references, debating over statistics and methodology and so on. There is an actual answer to the question: does immigration add to productivity or reduce consumption. (Both you say? Great, show me a study!)
Isn't this a side effect of adding more regulations onto full-time workers? Seems like if the overhead for a full time employee keeps going up and the regulations keep getting more strict, we'll see more that risk and cost outsourced more and more to companies that specialize in circumventing things and keeping the extra expenses as low as possible.

The intent behind these regulations, whether healthcare or immigration control, is really beside the point. I'm wondering if these things are really enforceable in the long run.

On top of everything else, as has already been mentioned, the rules seem to provide competitive advantages to large companies (or at least those willing to outsource to them) over small ones. This probably decreases the level of innovation, dynamism, and entrepreneurship in the economy.
Wait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.
It seems to me that he never really gets to the point of why he is afraid of telephones (even making calls, apparently).
Can't find a good explanation on a single page, but there's a few things that come together here:

- government run postal service in China which doesn't chase profit as much

- international agreements: when using standard post, only the sending country pays the costs - the receiving country is expected to finish the delivery essentially at their cost that they can reclaim on their own international mail cost

So: send from Hong Kong directly, use bulk sea freight at minimal cost, let the receiving end worry about the last-mile delivery at their cost.
Everything you wanted to know about Bitcoin but were afraid to ask
I think the problem is that there's a perception that a phone call is an interrupt event. Because you have a person on the phone waiting for you to answer, you have to (or should) answer the call.

So, if the matter is important then a phone call is completely appropriate. But if it's just a call to say "hey, how's it going?" then perhaps a text message or email is a better choice with a "let me know when it's a good time to call" added in so you can have a normal voice conversation without either party being interrupted.
My body. It tells me what I need to know about air quality. (Not snark, though I imagine everyone will think it is.)

What are you trying to do here? A few details would help folks give you feedback.
I’m citing numbers for an individual. The median household income is almost $60k. The median household could easily retire with $1M. I’ll say it again, they are too lazy.
Notre Dame vs. Miami live stream
You're literally talking about decentralized social media such as what ActivityPub suggests and is attempting to implement.
My reading of that was that "rename" in that context meant "rename your package from Foo-1 to Foo-2", not come up with a completely brand-new name.
Really there's nothing to be proud of about writing programs to kick people off a system - that's called being an asshole - or distributing warez, that's called stealing. I'd hope people learning about technology today can do it without needing to do those 'subversive' things...
The secret to pensions is making contributions. Places like New York that legally require full contributions are doing fine (although that is not cheap to do). Places like Illinois who skip the bill or most companies post 1980 who steal the money are a different story.
>If that's really the case, challenging the applications is the first deterrent to this sort of behavior. I doubt anything will eliminate 100% of the abuse but if we can cut it significantly, I'd call that a win.

The problem is that is not really what is happening. USCIS is challenging nearly every single application with challenges that do not match the requirements for an H1B and then dragging those challenges with red tape.

They are probably aware that in the end almost all of these challenges will be won by the applicants. So the (likely intentional) result of this is that many people who won the H1B lottery are now in an awkward situation where their previous work visa has expired but their H1B hasn't started yet because of all of these challenges. So many of those people cannot legally work since there is now a gap in work authorization and are being fired or relocated back to their home country, despite the fact that they would likely have gotten their H1B in the end.
Monoprice: $1.76 - https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=102&cp_id=10218&cs_id...
I thought it was using wkwebview, which is faster than uiwebview, but still behind safari in terms of js performance on iOS.
An interesting database related to biomimicry: https://asknature.org/
I just deleted 23,000 emails from gmail – here's how to do it
> ソ comes from the Chinese character 會

ソ comes from 曾 ("once, at one point") not 會. Yes, those are different characters.
The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example:

`The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t`

Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself as `katana` and as a component of words like 太刀, 印刀, 日本刀, &c. (see http://kanji.quus.net/jyukugo1498/) Is this really pointing to a distinct concept from 刀 in Korean, as the article suggests?
Have you seen these videos? Spiderman peeing on Elsa? Come on.
Aviary used to have a suite of multimedia applications implemented in Flash. It was pretty slick, but shut down once the company pivoted to apps and was bought by Adobe. There was a Photoshop alike, a vector editor, and others. All gone now.

https://paulstamatiou.com/first-impressions-aviary-app-suite...
From an operations standpoint while I'd certainly like to see more logging in code branches that aren't seen often or expected by the developers (I am all too familiar with patching code that a developer wrote without knowing how many ways a function can fail outside the confines of their test environment) many of the logging statements I'd like to see are pretty routine and let me know that something is actually running as expected. This methodology errs on the side of removing statements I'd want. In the absence of instrumentation and infrastructure that can definitively tell me that a program has not deadlocked, I'd far rather have a crying baby than a silent baby.

With that said, I've seen developers write some woefully negligent logging statements that cost millions of dollars in production monthly due to the sheer amount of output that's generated and the extra management and storage costs necessary. When your write amplification from a 1 KB input blows up into 100MB minimum and 50% of that is whitespace or semantically useless statements like "ok" you have to start questioning the value of a log statement in that environment at all.

This is a topic that doesn't get much discussion so I'm glad to see people actually studying it.
To address the argument from authority, the presumption there is that the existing expertise has been self selected by a rational and efficient market, which in the government contracting sphere is very much not necessarily rational, and I think you'd have a hard time finding an efficient market anywhere.

It's pretty clear that from first principles, reusable rockets are a win[0]. The question of actualizing those principles can only be assessed by actually doing it, and is likely to be highly empirical. Unless there have been secret launches we don't know about, the ESA cannot possibly have good insight about whether or not it's valuable.

[0] then why haven't they done it yet? As a constrained market, none of the contractors who normally build rockets have had to yet. Moreover, I presume a lot of the computational engineering would not have been so easy 10-20 years ago, much less in a large contracting company with established folkways.
Orbital ATK rocket launch aborted after small plane enters airspace
The second they charge, 75% of users go to Instagram and don’t come back.
I noticed that people of my age (30+) who don’t take unknown calls usually feel inner insecurities that influence (or cause) their unhappy lives. It may be debt, unmet responsibilities, fear of being abused, etc. I can remember the time when landlines were new and everyone was excited to take a call and to speak to someone who’s not even around.

The story also reminds me an old joke/anecdote. English gentlemen club, a gentleman naps in a chair near the fireplace. His boots are almost on fire. One man notices that, but the club etiquette disallows one to speak to the person he doesn’t know. After looking for pretty long he finally finds someone who at least knows the name of that gentleman and is able to speak to him. They wake him up and after a greeting the gentleman who knows him says: “Dear Sir, it is rainy weather today, and this fireplace is conveniently hot. By the way, I’m sad to tell you that your left boot is already burned down.”

I think that author puts too many gentle ceremony into just a short call.
> last time i looked labour laws were vastly different between the US and Germany...

Labour laws in the US seem to boil down to "should have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps harder" .
Sure it happens to people all the time, but in average it does not.

No I have not. No one should even start a family on $21k. Again, poor choices if they do. I’m tired of the mentality of victim hood.
Does anyone remember the Winnebiko?

https://microship.com/winnebiko/

It was my first exposure to the "digital nomad" lifestyle. I thought it was super cool. I still do. The world would be a more interesting place if more people did stuff like this.
Hm I figured Django may be guilty of that. FWIW I learned web apps on RoR but my first job was Django. Django (or at least, apps in practice) was definitely less magic than Rails, although I see what you mean about a lot of the config being less transparent than one might like. I always have to eg hit SO to figure out how to add something to the admin since the model for how it works is not transparent.

I’ll definitely check out Tornado and the others for how they compare.
Do what here?
I did this too, although it was the late 90’s. I’d be bored in class and come up with algorithms and program ideas on paper. Sometimes it would be a week or more before I’d get to try them.

Just the other day I was thinking about limiting my use of the internet and coding without relying on internet access, like I did when I learned Visual Basic, C++ and Python twenty years ago...
On the irrationality of e + Pi [video]
Which version of NPM? Because you should be aware that

> The behaviour of package-lock.json was changed in npm 5.1.0 by means of pull request #16866. The behaviour that you observe is apparently intended by npm as of version 5.1.0.

> That means that package.json can trump package-lock.json whenever a newer version is found for a dependency in package.json. If you want to pin your dependencies effectively, you now must specify the versions without prefix, that means you need to write them as 1.2.0 instead of ~1.2.0 or ^1.2.0. Then the combination of package.json and package-lock.json will yield reproducible builds. To be clear: package-lock.json alone does no longer lock the root level dependencies! [0]

The release notes he references are an absolute farce. All of this bluster about how "npm@5's first semver-minor release!" is going to provide "a much more stable experience." And yet,

> It fixes [#16866], allowing the package.json to trump the package-lock.json.[1]

Fixes, ha! Even that link is broken.

Folks, that was a major breaking change. And they introduced it in a "minor" update. I agree with Rich Hickey that "semver" is an epic failure. He even uses package managers as an example in the cited talk, saying, What if you had to worry about what "version" of Maven central you were using? Well, that's exactly what npm did (only in the client).

How did I stumble onto this point? Because it broke the very first CI build I deployed to GitLab. Worked locally with Rollup 0.50.0, but Rollup 0.50.1 (which the CI used, because caret) introduced a regression that happened to break my package.

So yeah, npm's default is not appropriate for CI. It assumes that patch updates are non-breaking, and we all know that they're not.

/rant

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45022048/why-does-npm-in...

[1] https://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v5.1.0
I miss the old cluster graph that AltaVista was rolling out right before they died.

I could search something like "trek", see that there were several very different clusters (one big one for science fiction; one big one for outdoors; and a smattering of smaller ones), and select the cluster I wanted to drill down into.

That should be even easier to do nowadays. Sadly, that seems to get in the way of irrelevant ad clicks, so nobody seems to have picked it up.
You've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments. Could you please stop and follow the guidelines instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, there is the assumption of “for those with coverage”. We couldn’t cut the line until we switched to T-Mobile, because AT&T could not get coverage to our house smack in the middle of Redmond, WA.
I don't agree with the author. There're plenty of use cases which aren't covered by machine learning and won't be covered by existing machine learning method in the future. Yes, we've came far with ML, but until we really have Software 2.0, a lot of time will pass.
Onion Investigator
Handwriting them makes for an 'a-ha' moment.
ツ and ソ are written left-right while シ and ン top-down.
Globalization means passing the laws you’re talking about amounts to protectionism. That’s not very popular with anyone but Trump.
May be not much convenient depending on the phone software, but you may consider setting default ring to something less noticable and/or demanding than “friendly ringtone” that you can set to selected contacts. There is also “don’t distract” mode afaik, with an ability to list contacts who can do it anyway.
You start by ending your practice of telling the Rebel what to do. Then you ask them "What do you think, Rebel?". And if it's reasonable, just say "Ok, then, when can I have that on my desk", and of course accommodate the Rebel's reality-to-actual-time factor. If it's not reasonable, then ask "What if we xxx'd instead?". You'll be surprised by the insights you receive that way. And of course you have to push back once in a while and call them out when their "insight" is actually "bullshit".

edit: If one happens to be a micromanager, one will have an extraordinarially difficult time with the Rebel.
> I didn't do a rollover when I changed employers (I think there is some time limit which I have likely exceeded).

There are several "timelimit" related aspects to 401k rollovers, neither would apply in your circumstance. You sound anxiety paralyzed like you made some "unfix-able past mistake" and there is zero reason for you to be.

> It is just sad :(

See my other comment about consolidating all of your legacy 401ks into a single robo-advisor (betterment/wealthfront/etc). It isn't hard, mainly consists of sending a few emails to HR departments and forwarding a few paper checks. Any robo-advisor will have a support team that will hold your hand through the process for free - they want to earn your business.
It sounds like a good idea in theory, and excuse my being unimiginitive, but answering services are even more blue collar than ride hailing. It's a lot of work that I'm not sure many people want (the operators and everyone else involved with running the service).

Anyway, the big problem with this concept is the profitability of answering services is predicated on constantly changing the rates and dropping "dead weight clients" (that is an industry term from the guy who facilitates answering service sales). I don't know if this is possible in an uberized answering service.

Would answered calls be worth enough that people would pay a higher rate during higher demand periods? I honestly don't think so.

The industry could stand some innovation - it is severely lacking. Why is it that 70% of all answering service sites are not served with TLS?

(hint: proprietary answering service equipment vendors have choked the industry and now it can't innovate)
I love how you are admittedly making something up the article doesn’t say (“implied”), and then proceed to call it “arrogant”.
"Join Medium to read this story"

What the fuck is this shit?
I'm not sure why this has been downvoted. James wrote this:

> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.

That meets the UK legal definition of a disability, and under UK law he can ask for reasonable adjustments to avoid telephones. He could give his mental health status as the reason he needs the reasonable adjustment, but most places won't know much about that, and so it would be easier if he used hearing impairment - many places know about hearing impairment, and have processes in place to avoid telephone use.

Maybe I should have said I'm speaking from personal experience: I've got a bank and some bits of government departments and some bits of the NHS to use email rather than telephone with me.
I like the idea of very short IF games, for the casual gaming era. Perhaps playable in a one hour commute.

I just don't have time for the multi month extravaganza IF games I played when I was a kid.

I wonder if such games exist.
Installing the free hanazono fonts should sort you out

For arch:

pacman -S ttf-hanazono
That's the joy of multinational bureaucraties where old people will do anything to stop young people's ideas to keep their cushy place.
> retired folks needed money to live on and were forced to remove some of their nest egg at the bottom

While I understand that people who are already retired can't just choose to keep working while their investments recover, I'm not aware of any retirement investing strategy that has you fully invested in stocks at the point you retire. The whole point of moving your retirement to safer investments around retirement age is so you don't have to take money out of stocks when there is a financial downturn.

I may be missing something, but you seem to be describing retirees with a very risky asset allocation. I'm not trying to minimize how devastating that was for people, but I am trying to understand what they were victims of. Were they victims of financial advisors recommending that type of asset allocation?
This is going to sound like I'm joking, but alcohol is the key to learning.

Find a class on it, one that's at night and one that has half the class go to the bar afterwards, ideally with Deaf people at the bar too.

The social situation, the lack of inhibitions/fears to try stuff, you really pick it up fast.
> in a couple of months for a few hundred, less if they already have a wire bonding machine and microscope.

How do I get my hands on a wirebond machine for a few hundred? The bottom end of "old and crusty but not actually broken" seems to start at a couple thousand on eBay. If my budget were a few hundred I'd probably spend a month just machining and grinding replacement microscope parts.

I suppose you could be referring to the marginal cost of an hour on a wirebond machine at the nearest NNIN facility, but last time I priced out training options the overhead to get started would have been $500-$1k.
At a not-even-breaking-new-ground level:

1. they could meld the treasure-hunt aspect of Pokemon Go with sponsored hyperlocal recommendations. ARGs (alternate reality games) are popular with Snapchat's core demographic, and if Snap could pitch itself as a platform for ARGs, their advertising woes would disappear.

2. microtransactions familiar from Asian messaging apps: cosmetic stuff like stickers, emoji packs, backgrounds, filters, etc

3. (macro-)transactions for large-scale content inside of Snapchat. Facebook had entire video games playable within it; there is no reason Snapchat can't do this. There is a market for VIP access for 'private' Snapchats of celebrities and creators, but today this is arranged out-of-band, because Snapchat provides no support for this in-app. Patreon was able to make headway in this underserved market.

4. Snapcash could compete with Paypal, but it's vastly overemphasized.

5. Snap Map has so much potential, and it's unexploited. From mundane to exotic, opportunities include location search, sponsored recommendations, user-generated content about real-life places (cf. Yelp), user matching for transactions (cf. Uber), user-generated content anchored in virtual space (AR stuff)...

6. Subscriptions. Either to gate specific content or features, or just for the sake of. Discord has a sponsor tier that gives a few perks but is just as much for the sake of providing support. There is always a subset of users who will pay.
I love "AXFR". It lets me AX FR the whole zone in one go.
It seems that I've offended a few people. Sorry. I ought to know better than making comments that are contentious, brief and joking.

My point is that I'm getting old. And so I've become more sympathetic to issues around spam calls to older people. Who may be hard of hearing, slow to understand, and gullible. I suffer from none of that so far. But I can fake it, following the Eddie script.

Basically, I give callers a chance to get that I'm old, and a little incoherent. If they back off, and apologize for bothering me, I thank them, and wish them the best of luck.

But if they push, knowing that I'm old and apparently vulnerable, I segue into full Eddie. With no regrets.