skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't have to be a thought experiment : just travel to pretty much any other country in the world besides the USA. Surprise: people are running restaurants, not going broke, and waiters are paid for their time like most other workers.
> It's an entertainment site, first and foremost.

Is it? I've always seen it pitched as a communication service with emphasis on staying in touch with friends and always being connected with loved ones.
It didn't used to be limited, but I believe it's because of frauds and scams. Maybe if you contact cavneb he can work something out?
App stores could easily enforce a rule like this. The maximum price could also appear next to the download link for the app so you know what you're getting into.
The flipside to this is that being on call forces developers to care about bugs in their code that cause operational headaches instead of just throwing releases with varying degrees of test coverage over the fence to ops. Funny how certain bugs that languished in the background get priority when the dev responsible for that code's phone is the one that rings at 3am instead of some poor schmuck on the ops team.
If they have to buy you, then its not really a monopoly. Thats how you would constantly gnaw at their position.
And the world wept
Meet the World's Youngest Self-Made Billionaire
No one is forced to own a bank account. Banks are not a public utility. They’re just a handy tool, first and foremost.

Why should they be regulated?

Because the more ubiquitous a service becomes, the more it is ingrained in everyday life, the harder it is to avoid. And it should be regulated.

After all, nobody is forcing you to have and use electricity. So why should power companies be regulated?

Or car manufacturers. Or anything really.

Because it makes society a better place.
I remember reading a study that posited low status men tended toward misogyny when they felt threatened by the skill of women they were competing against, and this was the first thing that came to mind as I was reading over this whole saga.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of those devs as well as other gamers just think that it's buyers fault for improperly spending money, and that it makes perfect sense as corporations exist for the maximization of profit.

It's true some responsibility does lie in the person with the wallet. But it just strikes me as odd that none of these companies are really held accountable for exploiting human behavior, specifically by gaming communities.
I've said this before, but I think a key component of contractors' rights going forward will be legislating their employers' ability to "lock them in" with loyalty programs and the like.

In this case, a large part of the issue seems to be certain orders from people (and companies) that have found loopholes in the pricing (bulk orders of large, heavy goods).

If contractors could decline these orders with no repercussions, they wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue. Instacart would fail to deliver these orders and quickly learn they need to change their pricing structure.

The argument could be made that you can go too far in giving contractors the right to decline. I can imagine various forms of extortion occurring or problems being unable to blacklist problematic contractors, but it's a tradeoff that seems to be too far in the company's favour right now. Maybe disincentiving contract work in service-critical environments is a good thing, considering the complaints about rising part time and contracted work and not enough full time work.
Aren't clicker games notorious for hidden difficulty curves, which are sometimes exponential?

The whole p2w model is based off of getting players invested with their time before making it too difficult to progress without investing cash. I'd bet the people who spend $30+ on the p2w version won't be willing to pay $30 up front to start investing time into a brand new game.
This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories.

By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.

What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.
Being a public utility is not binary. Facebook is not as much a public utility than water, but more or a public utility than just being "an entertainment site".

Many social groups use Facebook to organize on. If an individual weren't on Facebook, they'd be much more socially isolated in the same way that if they didn't use a phone (considered a public utility), they'd also be more isolated. I suspect for some people, Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp is more important than a telephone number.

Some services now require Facebook to use their service. For example, for people who can't afford to own a car, GetAround lets you rent neighbors cars, but they don't accept a government issued ID, only Facebook.
>Because the legality is set up so that it's only those who have a lot of money who can do this.

The middle class can very well benefit from offshoring. It may not be for everyone, but it certainly isn’t only a thing for rich people.
Hmm, I commend your point, however I think there is room for debate on both sides.

To defend hibernation/shutdown: if I lose my laptop or it is stolen, and I realize I will never see it again, then at least I will have peace of mind that no one can ever recover the data, assuming I had a strong password.

An evil maid attack assumes I will have the laptop in my possession again. This is a different problem, and requires different measures to defend against. I'm interested in hearing why you think leaving a laptop in sleep mode protects it from an evil maid attack.
Badly. We've lost a couple devs/ops people in the last year, and haven't adequately replaced them. We're stretched way too thin and everyone is getting very burned out.

I haven't done any significant development work in more than six months, just chasing bugs, doing support, and fussing with email and meetings. It blows; I've got to find a different job.
What you describe enforces a stratified society and supports the thesis of TFA.
Hi-

I'm sorry if my comment above was too inflammatory - I meant to point out that both teachers & students are put in a difficult situation. The comment was specifically worded to target the 'education industry' (the profiteers who take advantage of student loans, which the submitted link is about), not the country's individual schools. 75 days ago I commented about an excellent teacher I had: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15181176

After I posted my little comment this morning, I took off on a road trip. NPR was rebroadcasting last Friday's show on the Ted Radio Hour. This week's episode was titled Simple Solutions [0]. Part 2 was "Sam Kass: Can Free Breakfast Improve Learning?" [1]. Part 3 was "Wendy Troxel: Does High School Start Too Early?" [2].

Apparently little things like improving the odds that all students are fed and rested can dramatically improve students' school experiences. But that doesn't fix the structural problem, which is...

> For the majority, you really have to force them to learn algebra and the 'boring but important as hell' stuff.

No no no no no. My dad's high school friend taught shop class. Some of his students loved his class, others would have rather been anywhere else ("Baking"), but shop was the only class that fit in their schedule. Forcing children to take "important" classes that they don't care about is a good way to elicit apathy.

I think John Gatto said "nothing of value to the individual happens through force." Gatto has some good insights. See my earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15693047 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760

> Third, classroom time is not prison for children. If your kid thinks it is, find another school or talk to the teacher and the admin.

School was a prison for me, and I was good at it.

Thanks for your post.

[0] https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/564577402/simple...

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_kass_want_to_teach_kids_well_f...

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_troxel_why_school_should_sta...
It would be interesting if HN detected such behaviour... Then it could ignore some downvotes. I know it doesn't sound like much, but undeserved downvotes hurt...
Always keep Law 38 in mind.
That might be your problem too. The absolute next thing I build, after features, is a feedback pipeline. I do this before even integrating the payment gateway. Often it's in the form of some support forum or in app public chatroom.

Take a close look at any comments wherever you advertise. I'd even recommend against FB/Google advertising at first because it's difficult to get feedback.

Analytics might help too and you can see where people are dropping off. But they're quite inefficient.

Sometimes you just have email people who signed up in person to ask them. People are usually very open to giving brief feedback; just don't drag them into some focus group or 10 minute talk.

Being able to iterate based on feedback is usually the make or break point of an early stage entrepreneur.
I think this might come off as negative to some, but I feel the exact same way. Very successful for my age, and I can easily date women. I am constantly let down by how low quality they are. They might be physically attractive, but beyond that I feel like I am jumping from poor relationship prospect to poor relationship for eternity.
> The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the same route miles, and are similarly old. Yet NYC’s system costs almost twice as much to run.

My two cents: things are more expensive in the United States due to us insisting on being so different in two major ways:

1.) Different safety and road standards. All of Europe, as well as many other countries have completely or partially adopted European road and rail safety standards. For example: in the United States if a passenger rail line shares track with freight trains the passenger cars are required to withstand collisions with heavy freight trains with a minimum of deformation. This makes everything heavy and unique. Emissions standards likewise mean that if you're still running diesel equipment that's all going to be very unique.

2.) We don't believe in social services in the United States. The NY MTA has to fund health care (via insurance) as well as pensions. TfL sure ain't subsidizing health insurance for its employees, although they may be funding a pension.

As it turns out the bigger your pool of risk, customers, whatever... the cheaper things get.
700M Daily income is still a bad performance
WHY WE MOVED FROM NOSQL MONGODB TO POSTGRESSQL
E=mc^2 . Thank you and good night.
There are tens of thousands of people working on code to do object recognition for free already. This is just a incentive to get them to tackle a particular problem in a vast sea (heh!) of problems they could work on. It's quite likely that very few people understand that this even is a problem, and fewer still who'd be interested in it enough to work on it.

This isn't getting people to work for free. It's simply getting people interested in a problem.
Sad to know that attitude pervades higher ed. Another reason students are well served choosing a teaching college for undergraduate instead of a research university.
I go back and forth on this, because there seems to be material disagreement on whether whales are, in fact, a) folks with problems or b) folks with hobbies which are, relative to a single video game, expensive.

There is a good presentation from the CEO of Kongregate talking about this here: https://www.slideshare.net/emily_greer/dont-call-them-whales...

I share your moral intuitions about exploiting whales if whales are, in fact, little old ladies suffering from social isolation or teenagers with undiagnosed depression. But the F2P companies say that they've done the research and come to the conclusion that most of their whales are gainfully employed professionals.

That sounds... not intrinsically implausible to me? I enjoy video games, quite a bit. Games, books, and hating on Bitcoin are my hobbies, and hating on Bitcoin is cheap. I have probably sustained $100 a month on video games for ten years now, and that would frequently be concentrated on a single game for an extended while (e.g. LoL for 2 years), likely resulting in me easily hitting their whale lists.

I feel like if I'm a central example of a whale that it isn't unethical to sell me things that I like? It's not a material amount of money given my financial situation. It compares very favorably to the time commitment for my main hobby, which causes _much_ more friction than the money does. (The primary reason I don't play LoL anymore is an unpauseable 40 minute game doesn't play well with having young children.) Most external observers would categorize me under Either A Responsible Adult Or At Least Fakes It Decently Most Of The Time. Similarly well-adjusted people in my social class spend similar amounts of money on things which are not morally different than Evelynn skins, for example Hamilton tickets.
The US is losing to China in the AI race
$75? Way to go big spender. ;-)

My latest shipment of Zenni's came in recently.

$28.26 for two pairs. And they came in ten days!

http://www.zennioptical.com
Unfortunately, I'd imagine the vast majority of the helpful information learned will be kept a proprietary secret.
Ask HN: What impact would the repeal of net neutrality have?
Especially on developers, startups, and the tech ecosystem.

E.g, will the repeal of NN only affect large media companies like Netflix / Youtube, or will it impact the web at large, and limit the distribution of smaller, non-media related startups?
I am not a fan of calling FB a utility. Are you ready to pay the taxes for a 5x buyout of FB when the government attempts to nationalize it? And what do you think its going to happen after the state has reins on it. Only bad things.
It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia.

First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.

Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.

Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.
Always go back to the classics

* The Design of Everyday Things
* Design for the Real World
* A Pattern Language
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form
* Never Leave Well Enough Alone
* Don't Make Me Think
* How Things Don't Work
* Usable Usability
* The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
* A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Other left-field books I've found myself going back to for design inspiration more than I would've thought

* The Death and Life of Great American Cities
* The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
* Influence by Robert Caldini
* Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
* The Art of Looking Sideways
* Cosmos
* Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
* The Theory of Moral Sentiments

And just specifically for computer UX, Smashing UX Design is a pretty good crash course.
The Constitution is not flawed it's the powerful who ignore it that's the problem. The two most populated states have the very worst policies and on an epic scale. You wouldn't get them to change their corrupt ways no matter what changes are made. There's no going back. Strength is in their numbers even if you drew a picture of how it's going to end up they will argue their weak to ridiculous points to the very bitter end. California is particularly difficult to accept. They have ruined one of the most beautiful areas of our country. For what? To keep their lifestyle in their gated mansions. The peons be damned. We suffer the most gross injustices in decades.
Why are RBMs so seldom used? What is their weak point? Based on Hinton's talk I thought it was a major breakthrough back then.
> After all, nobody is forcing you to have and use electricity. So why should power companies be regulated?

It is absolutely possible to have privatized power supply.
Yeah its always been the YMMV scenario - even when it was only the old coders on the web.

With everyone on the web, it turns out that now large meta processes - like elections, are being affected.

At this point, things are no longer the same, and new meta systems are required.

The world changed, and the internet is no longer just for us.
Try Zoho Notebook. You can lock a notebook which would not encrypt your notes but locks the visibility of your notes. And all your notes sync across your devices. Visit https://zoho.com/notebook for more details.
What Is Happening in Property Over the Next 12 Months, and Why?
Doordash for whatever reason just deactivated my account. No warning, no explanation. Just deactivated. Sorry, but your service isn't worth my time to try to re-activate. Bye!
Well, our language is a very blunt instrument and often gets in the way of clear and nuanced communication.

Almost all the products advertised as free ask for some other form of payment.

Not all of them are harmful, far from it, but we fail at discussing it if we can't even name these different variations.

There is the game platform that will give you games for free because it wants you to register so there is less friction later on when you want to buy something there. Also, this way you have registered your mail in order to send you ads.

Many services on the web are free but this time they mine your personal information in order to target ads

Free to play games want to hook you like an addict using manipulation techniques.

Etc

They are all very different, and not necessarily all bad, but we don't even differentiate them that well in my opinion.
Razzle: SSR Without the Framework
One issue with that is that it cheapens the other route you can take.

If you need 100 hours to unlock all the characters (playing through lots of times was common for fighting games I recall) but you advertise you can buy them for $60, it puts a price on your time and takes the achievement of spending those hours getting better and puts it as "worth $60".
The Play Store already does that.
Moscow Metro does 40 of trains per hour (doesn't save from sardine can effect tho) so one per 3 minutes is not a hard limit.
I agree that bars on my windows are a lot to ask for, and lack elegance and convenience.

My Linux OS can hibernate, and I've not found it to be noticeably inelegant or inconvenient. I suppose others' opinions may differ.
I happen to be somewhat dysfunctional at the present, tyvm.

John Gatto and John Holt have both written extensively on the corrupt nature of compulsory schooling. I linked to some of Gatto's works in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14425760
Illustrated very well by 'How to reply' in pt.4:

> Point out that if Wikipedia had been around at the time of Galileo, it would have had a duty to report the claims of the Catholic church as fact, without qualification, despite the conspiracy that undoubtedly existed.
Perhaps I misinterpreted your previous comment "I think she ought to tone it down a bit."
93 media agencies working together to analyse some 13 million documents ... and you don't think they've employed one or two lawyers with domain expertise to assist?

While the documents may be interesting to you and others, they're not yours to disseminate. If the graph is meaningless to you, then you should ignore it.

I note that the Australian Tax Office published a press release [1] earlier this month around the Paradise Papers. Presumably other nation state revenue collection agencies have released similar, or at least have comparable expectations from this latest set of papers.

Reading between the lines, there's an expectation that a release of the entire set of source papers may reduce the efficacy of their efforts to recover these lost revenues. I concede that I may be optimistic in my interpretation and expectations here.

[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Media-centre/Media-releases/ATO-state...
I am at my wits end. I am getting exhausted and drained in these interviews.

There are times where I just botch interviews. Here and there, I look back and realize I came off the wrong way, like wow, I did that. But I reflect, and strive to get better. Sometimes it's just not a fit. Or someone comes along that's a better option than me.

But there is a growing pocket of places I interview at where they blatantly lie, bait and switch, ignore my portfolio and go right into brainteasers, code golf, and refactors that have absolutely nothing to do with the role being filled. Then radio silence.

I'm coming to the conclusion I'd rather earn less and work more hours on my own than enable this system. Because I have an indictment far more damning the OP: Some of the people interviewing me can barely code and are trying to survive another day. Not to mention, there are some who are afraid of letting in a stronger candidate that could replace them. Heh, what do you think they do?

Last interview I had, I discussed multiple times it being in Django and Python. Come the time of our call, interviewer flipped the script, it's in JavaScript, Underscore, and the data being passed around is so ambiguous it meshed together in my mind through the remainder of our call. I don't know if it's a clueless interviewer - or a really shrewd one who knew how to lay one over me.

Or is it me? The problem I face is getting beat down by all these tests makes me feel I'm not a good coder. Due to the fog of Dunning-Kruger, I know I can never be sure if the deficit is really on my end or not.

Does anyone else out there feel this?

I have published code all over. I code 10+ hours a day, even on the weekends. I get hammered in technical interviews.
That's only one fraction of what our govt tries to control. People think they literally need to run every aspect of our lives. We're finding out what it's like to have the govt run our healthcare and make decisions for us. The govt actually is supposed to be in office to protect us. If all goes well we will have many agencies closed that had no business being govt run. Private is always the best way to hold people accountable. That and competition.
They are network monopoly - it makes no sense to use other site where I have no one to speak with.

Same with Google - website optimise for Google and Google ranks them higher. Network effect completely captured the market.

Another word for it is 'experience monopoly' - there is no one else that can offer remotely useful to it.
POLICEMAN WHO TRIED TO COMMIT SUICIDE
Show HN: A Christmas-themed remote controlled 3D puppet
If the company thinks this is the person best qualified to judge applicants, you're dodging a bullet.

There are so many reasons this is a bad way of thinking.

- A sample size of one is never enough. This alone is enough of a reason.

- The interviewer could have normally been a great person but been having a rough day (maybe some personal stuff or a huge deadline coming up - every company has those every once in a while, you might have just got them at a bad time)

- The original interviewer had to cancel last-minute (call from the hospital/school, car crash, etc) and the company decided that it would be more professional to put you with someone with less experience than cancel thirty minutes before your interview (which could be good or bad depending on how you see it)

I'm not saying that you're completly wrong - it's definitely an indicator that the company may not be one you want to work for. But you shouldn't rule out a company because of one bad interview.