skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's kill it by having semi local wireless mesh networks. That would be enough for basic web (mail, irc, average website).
Yeah, but after fixing the "smaller" issues, we tend to forget about the bigger issues. Also, we lose leverage, and the problem quickly becomes abstract.
I am not close to the Gnome community, so could somebody aware of the context tell us how serious/realistic/close-term this ideas page is?
Yes, but.

It's no good if you fix excel by making it not excel. The whole reason excel is so popular is the intuitive, unintimidating but terribly wrong way it mixes data, code and GUI. Functions in the data, constants repeated in every row, hard coded variables all over the place. If you're just supplying a GUI and hiding the code, the user can't change, add or debug anymore. The point is that they can code, even if they don't know they are coding.

The trick is to think up a way of shipping VisualStudio, but making it less terrifying to engineers, managers and such.
Example of fancy or non-trivial?
I think that factoid comes from that shitty graph where the suppose that the UPS driver starts working straight at the moment they turn 18 and they will have maximum pay rate that is available for the UPS driver position.

While in reality, the average wait time to become a driver from loading is 11 years. During that time you make about $13/hr part time where the schedule can be horrible and you could work less than 15 hours a week.
When you do become a driver it takes another ~2 years (on avg) to get your own route until then you are a part time worker and your hours worked will fluctuate a lot over the year. The first year is paid at 17.50-18.50/hr (~$36,000/yr @ 40 hours a week) and then goes up.
https://pastebin.com/tLQ8LTvp

It uses praw [1] for the API.

[1] https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
My wife is in medical school and we often talk about these types of issues.

I think this article is a bit misleading in suggesting that the limitation of spots in residency programs are intentionally and disingenuously imposed.

The reality is training doctors is very, very hard and there simply enough resources to do it properly. This is not an issue with medicine alone.

We're seeing similar trends in the tech industry where developer salaries are sky-rocketing because there is a lack of highly qualified talent. Even with a slew of "bootcamps", "code universities", and a general influx to the industry the tech industry still doesn't have enough highly qualified individuals.

The medical industry is facing a similar issue, but everything has even higher standards because medicine involves human life. The medical industry is trying to keep up (my state has opened 3 new medical schools in the past 5 or so years), but it takes a very, very long time for organizations to find the proper resources and build a proper program. I believe my wife's school was in works for 10 to 15 years before opening its doors 4 years ago.

Opening more spots requires finding qualified doctors who not only understand the subject well, but can actually teach it. This severely limits the sample size. On top of that, these programs also require doctors who are willing to put up with medical students and residents on a daily basis.

Could you imagine if you were paired with the new development intern every day of your working life? You'd go crazy.

----

I do think something needs to be changed, but I don't think medical schools and residencies are really the place to make an impactful change. I see a lot of value in doctors becoming "supervisors" and managing a team of nurse practitioners or physician assistants. Then again, we're seeing similar training issues in both of those fields.
Patch Set Merge 1.5?
Well, I am one, but the things I say here are my individual opinions and observations. I just think that as an insider I get some insights that you'd normally not get from the media, and I figured I'd share them.
I did no such thing, nor have I made any comment about baggage or exemption from history. The exact opposite: I pointed out that Dems need to be better at realizing that no one is pure and accepting less than perfect candidates...

Robert E Lee is a part of a confederate heritage fondly opined about by significant numbers of Republicans. That heritage has more than a little "Kill the Yankee" sentiment to it, right? That's a pretty objective fact, hence the double standard in the opposition research against Bernie, hence its use as an example.

To your secondary point: the verifiable fact that said heritage has been overtly reshaped into a modern fantasy by racists and racist organizations, its correlation to Jim Crow, its disingenuous hand-waiving about slavery, and its tight ties to the [Republican Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) kinda sorta do mean that supporting, aggrandizing, or selectively portraying it beyond the limits of its historical boundaries is pretty darned supportive of racism. I think describing the common fellating of this anti-history from otherwise anti-minority, anti-immigration, anti-democracy, fundamentalists as 'waxing poetic with a glint in their eye' is putting is kindly and mildy.

Right wingers showing fondness for the Confederacy is hardly a secret... I mean, who signed all those bills and built all those statues?
The government here collects fees through nationalized institutions like vehicle insurance and licensing, so if you get a police ticket/fine for anything including jaywalking you have to pay it before they will let you renew insurance. I would imagine a nationalized ISP would do the same, seize your access to the internet in exchange for paying off city/state/provincial fines or even student debt.

Another problem of public owned utilities is the ruling regime raiding the coffers for party funds, which forces the utility to jack the rates every year since they are a corporation that operates without any savings. They also parachute in a new regime crony every election to be the well paid CEO and fill the board with party hacks as well, ensuring the public utility never goes against the wishes of the regime (and gives their friends huge salaries in the +1m range). Public ISPs would have to operate at the city/local level and no higher for the public to retain any control over it and not have it turn into yet another fine collecting branch.
That's what copy-on-write is for. ;)
> If I contract someone to make me a logo, I can normally safely assume there won’t be lingering IP issues after I have the deliverable.

This clause is not about copyright on the logo itself. It's about trademark law and all the difficulties therein.

I understand your concern about copyright. In copyright, the source of the image is what matters, not its appearance: If you created your own logo that happens to be similar to an existing logo, but did not actually copy the existing item (and could prove that), you'd be fine. If you did copy it, and made significant changes until it didn't look confusingly like the original, you'd be guilty. But this isn't the problem that "perform due diligence to determine that the use of the Design Resources is free of any adverse claims and is not subject to any third party rights" is warning you about.

Trademark law is different than copyright law. If you create a brand new logo that, unfortunately, happens to look by random chance similar to another logo that already exists in your market but you didn't know about, that's an IP issue. You need to search out and differentiate your logo from all conflicting logos that already exist.

This search is why no artist or automatic logo generator could guarantee that you're able to use the outputs.
Bitpay is a payment processor, they receive bitcoin on behalf of a store, and then give the store USD or EURO or whatever. When Bitpay says their activity has gone up, that means more bitcoin is being used to pay for real goods, services, etc.

Please go back and read the article, or just look at their homepage...
What does "deserve" have to do with it? People who work at Walmart deserve a living wage and a financially secure retirement, too.

If there's an artificial restriction in the supply of doctors (because the government sets an arbitrary limit on the number of residency slots it will fund), then doctor salaries are inflated by government fiat. If we increase the number of residency slots to reduce the price of medical care --- which everyone seems to agree we badly need to do --- then doctor compensation will decrease. You seem to believe that's a bad thing.
The dev.to search engine is actually pretty damn useful
It may not be actionable at all. Executives are where they are for a good reason: they are (usually) good communicators, effective at presenting a hopeful future even if the present sucks. The only thing employees can do is to decide if its worth working for them, as usually they don't have much control over the direction of the company.
Enormous Extinct Sea Cow Fossil Found on Russian Island
TL;DR: US companies stand to benefit from reduced regulation.

This is a case where a few companies really want to be able to change their pricing structures to increase profits, and consumers in general don't want that but also aren't particularly involved. So there isn't a big public outcry (except among HN readers <3) and these companies are lobbying the FCC hard to make "business-friendly" changes. It's called concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.
This 1000%. The companies you mentioned don’t innovate on tech, they innovate on sucking up to executives and convincing them to buy things that the executive’s own staff recommends against. They have extraordinarily well-oiled sales machinery that deftly bypasses any kind of sanity checking inside the customer’s company and devote all their efforts to keeping it running.
Think "bottom-up/biological" (psychiatric) vs. "top-down/behavioral" (psychological). Many behavioral disorders have components of both, which means that you either need a psychiatrist doing both med management and behavioral work (e.g. therapy) OR a psychiatrist + psychologist working together to address the problem. The second option can be quite a bit cheaper, since the behavioral treatment is usually far more time-intensive, and psychologists' time is generally less expensive.
Nobody uses Weston, Weston is like the reference thing, each DE is implementing their own compositor. Some DE like Mate hope they can use Mir and so get an easy way to add Wayland support. Ubuntu uses Gnome now so they use Mutter for wayland, Mir would be use for IoT and other non desktop platforms nd there is the possibility that others DE would use it.
Accountants invented spreadsheets. Programmers made electronic spreadsheet programs. The reason why spreadsheets are so popular among otherwise not technically people is because it was developed by business people over the course of centuries.

Unfortunately, if you're not technically inclined and someone gives you a big hammer, at a certain point you're gonna have to stop hammering everything you encounter and learn how to use a screwdriver.
Do others read this as an indication AG Schneidermann is getting ready to sue the FCC to get info on the fake comments?
There are multiple factors at work, only one of which is funding.

Residents are required to handle a minimum number of a large variety of cases by the time they graduate, in order to guarantee that they've seen a representative sample of cases in their field and have knowledge of all of them. E.g. a neurosurgery resident might need to do (completely fabricated numbers) 30 open vascular cases, 50 spine fusions, 40 tumors, etc. This is probably the primary limiting factor for specialist surgery residencies; these residents are profitable (they can handle the bulk of most simple cases fairly autonomously once they're a couple years into their training, and they stick around for 5-7 years), so many hospitals would like to hire more of them, but there are simply not enough patients with the necessary conditions for them to add more trainees.

For non-surgical residencies, the residencies are much shorter (so you have less time from highly-skilled residents), and the residents are less profitable, so funding is a significant limitation.

It's also important to note that residents are competing with mid-levels in the "less expensive practitioners" category, and mid-levels are a far better deal for the hospital in most specialties. They're somewhat more expensive in terms of raw salary, but they remain mid-levels, which means they have the time to develop near-perfect competence at the things they do handle, and they don't leave just when you've trained them up. A few good mid-levels make all the difference in keeping a department running smoothly.
Someone with HIV who takes their antiretroviral therapy as prescribed has the same life expectancy as someone who doesn't have the virus. Most people only need to take one pill a day. The side-effect profile is extremely good - some people get diarrhoea or nausea during the early stages of treatment, but most people experience no significant long-term side-effects. The vast majority of people will have an undetectable viral load within a few months of starting treatment, meaning that they have effectively no chance of passing on the infection.

As chronic diseases go, HIV really isn't particularly unpleasant. The majority of people aged over 60 are suffering from something far worse - hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, ischaemic heart disease, COPD etc.

The gentleman mentioned in the article is behaving in an incredibly reckless fashion. He has rejected a safe and effective treatment in favour of something completely untested, for no obvious benefit. He is clearly suffering, but I think his problems are primarily psychological rather than biomedical.
> good video

VERY bad video. Let me explain:

The video says shipping companies charge different fees with different speeds. And that net neutrality is like having all lines of the highway at the same speed.

That is NOT what net neutrality is about. It's about not distinguishing the content of the packages, or car passengers. No NN is like I try to send a package and deny it or charge me a fee because it contains nudes or because the receiver is black.

> If ISPs can route traffic based on protocol and provider then they can possibly save significant amount of money and improve performance for their customers. They can shuttle latency sensitive protocols over expensive links and allow bulk transfers to use massive amounts of cheap bandwidth to reduce their own and their customer's costs.

That's already done (except the provider part), it's called QoS. And it can easily be done without looking where do the packets go or what they contain.
The confusion, backpedaling, retractions, straw grasping and general abuse of the concept of computer security is extremely troubling. This is clearly an example of such nonsense. I'm not a huge fan of FB, but can you imagine being put in this position? 'Russia hacked the election! You WILL do something about this RIGHT?' Probably a new and unique position for Zuckerberg.
Unit Testing Affects Codebases in Surprising Ways
Huh, I thought only TechCrunch was the advertising "news" secret arm of Silicon Valley investors? I didn't realize the WSJ did advertising "news" pieces also.
I tried it. It .. does nothing. Maybe there are/were reference implementations for the protocol extensions too?
>Giving the government near-total control over our internet access is going to introduce more problems that it would solve.

I love how we are facing a present, practical problem that is the complete opposite of this dystopian hypothetical that people damn near have a fetish over. Yet it still gets brought up as some kind of counter weight to current circumstances. And this kind of attitude is why we're here. We elected a host of representatives that basically ran on "gummit bad!" and when they start handing power over to private entities some of you still don't have the self-awareness to see how absolutely ABSURD it is to sit there and go "But if the government had all the power think about how BAD it would be!" -- all while willfully ignoring that we're still a republic. It's unlikely to be that bad. We're here because we choose to be.

Right now, giving more power to private entities is going to cause far more problems than the government having/had power is/did or maybe even ever could.

Never in the history of this country have we had a problem in where the government has too much power and private entities have too little. Not once. The U.S. government has only had its scope of responsibilities expanded due to the misconduct of private entities over the course of our history. Yeah, governments CAN be bad and they CAN do bad things -- in general. But right now what we have is, in a glorious stroke of irony, people running the government who hate the government.

Basically, TL;DR, the whole censorship boogeyman is just rhetorical misdirection and is completely, utterly, and frustratingly unproductive.
It's been really interesting to see the interplay between State Attorneys General and the federal executive branch over the past decade. I don't know enough legal history to know if this contention is new or has always happened. But the contrast between what happened with regulation of carbon and coal is fairly striking. The federal judicial brach said that it had to be regulated in order to meet the laws that the legislative branch had passed, executive branch followed through with regulations based on science and input from stakes holders. We ended up with regulations on coal plants that are weaker than Chinese restrictions on their own plants. State AGs revolted, to little effect.

In the last year, regulatory decisions at the FCC, EPA, and DOE are being made by fiat, without any of the typical study and justification that typically goes into them. In particular, DOE suggestions to FERC have been denounced by nearly everybody in the energy industry, by nearly every interested outsider, and in a bipartisan fashion from lots of prior FERC commissioners. The general whims of a single person are taking precedence over having market principles, or really any other principle at all. The only parties in favor of the regulations at all are those who directly benefit by guaranteed payments, and they only justify their favor of the regulations through a massive and legally questionable expansion of regulatory power of the regulatory agency, something that these particular partisans are usually against.

With the FCC, we see something similar, an impulse to make regulations without much reasoning behind those regulations except that they favor a small group.

This type of regulation, where particular parties are favored, rather than particular principles, is madness.
No problem. Do you happen to have a source for the algorithm you explained, though? I recognize the parity-check matrix, but the rest I can't seem to find in any of the usual coding theory texts; usually, they treat erasures as part of the full RS decoding process.
Schneiderman is doing far more for net neutrality with his Spectrum lawsuit than the FCC has done (even pre-Pai, the FCC did nothing about peering extortion for example). But this stuff about fake comments seems to be nothing more than procedural bikeshedding since the FCC ignored all the comments anyway.
everyone know's it's men who do it so don't pretend it's a reversible situation
Continuing Transparency on Russian Activity
This is simply a disagreement between content publishers and content distributors. When a big satellite TV provider acted unfavorably toward a few major television networks during contract (re)-negotiation, those select few decided not to renew their license with the satellite TV company, causing viewers to ask why they can't get their favorite channel that their neighbor still gets.

The internet works similarly in that an electronic contract is formed when an ISP attempts to access content on web server. The client/ISP "requests" the content, and the publisher agrees and serves it up. But there's nothing stopping a collective "big few" from denying access to the content based on the host name of the ISP requesting it.

Ergo, if Verizon doesn't want to play "fair" with regards to content distribution, Facebook/Google/Twitter/Netflix/Reddit and whomever else could deny access to Verizon subscribers with an ol fashioned HTTP 403 or 401.

Yes, traffic drops, people realize quickly that they can't access any of their favorite sites, things must be broken, and switch companies.
There was a TV programme the other night about an employment agency in SE UK that could not find enough British workers to do the work it had on its books, and how Brexit had made things worse as many immigrants the agency was previously placing in work had returned their home countries. My thoughts on this were: those jobs were not paying enough to attract labour from the local market, but immigrants were prepared to accept lower wages; thus, the jobs were actually not viable without cheap foreign labour. This looks like a ponzi scheme to me. Does it ever end? Is the plan to continue with immigration for ever? Going by the arguments of the pro-immigration side that immigrants are net contributors then surely we should aim to have the entire population of the world living in the UK? What population do we want in the UK - 80 million? 100 million? 500 million? I would like an answer - I've noticed you never ever get one from a Remainer, because the truth is there is no plan, and whilst in the EU the UK had no control over immigration.

If ending the ponzi scheme and paying enough to attract British workers means we have to get a bit poorer, so be it, I am happy to do so to hold the forces of globalism at bay just a short while longer. I like diversity, and I want it to remain - how dull and disappointing it would be to live in a world where every country is made up of the same undifferentiated global populace and culture.

Or we just continue the ponzi by attracting more workers from outside the EU, e.g. Commonwealth countries, with which the UK has strong historic ties - we just get to choose the highly skilled and temporary labour we want, rather than having no choice over who comes, as is the case whilst the UK remains in the EU.
> Malls or touchscreens that display info and you can interact.

Why would that require anything new? I mean, Canonical is in the server OS business mostly, right?
The revocation of the Net Neutrality rules became a foregone conclusion once Donald Trump was elected. The sad reality is there's not much we, Eric Schneidermann or anyone else can do about it.

There are 5 FCC commissioners but only 3 may be of the same party. Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr and Michael O'Rielly are locks to vote in favor, so it will pass, 3-2.

At this point the best thing people can do is prepare to vote in 2018 and 2020, whether that's registering voters or forming groups to get lazy liberals or independents to vote to send better people to Washington.

One side aspect that I think hasn't been covered: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is a former Verizon lawyer and probably plans to parley his government experience into a lucrative gig at one of the big telcos once the Republicans are inevitably thrown out of office, so he stands to personally profit from this decision.

As Donald Trump would say, SAD.
Oh, I thought it referred to being dead, not fired. Whoops.
Author here. In reading this thread, I'm struck that most of the objections to emacs are both legitimate (as are the arguments for it) and focused on programmer-specific issues. Back when I wrote the original post, I was experimenting with using emacs as a CEO who writes little code these days, but was dealing with a maelstrom of disparate information and interruption. It's been a very successful experiment, which I'll document in a follow up post soon. Glad that it got some good conversations going!