skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>We conclude that the real question is not why unhealthy food is so cheap but why people consume unhealthy food despite it being more expensive. The answer, we suggest, is that taste and convenience often play a larger role in people’s food choices than price or nutritional quality.

I suggest you consider the fact that many people in the US, especially in poor, urban areas live in "food deserts" where there are no supermarkets close by that sell healthy food at reasonable costs.

http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...

If you are poor and have no vehicle you depend on mass transit. This costs both money and time. If you are poor and lucky enough to have a job, its likely to be a low-paying job with a lengthy commute (in terms of time, bus and train transfers, if not in distance). This leaves you very little free time to spend half of a day for a lengthy trip outside of your food desert to get some fresh food. There is also the issue of bringing your groceries home. Have you ever tried to ride the bus or the train while carrying a bunch of packages, especially when it is crowded? How about transferring buses and trains while trying to carrying several packages? Do you have a proper kitchen? Many poor people don't. Proper storage facilities and equipment? Most poor people have roaches.

These are just some of the collective obstacles faced by many poor people in terms of their access to fresh food.
Interesting to see how much they've invested into Orion. I've been working as a seasonal driver, and where I am it's universally ignored, every driver simply uses the "regular delivery order". I think it's plausible many haven't tried it.

I'd like to try using it before I finish.
You don't have to spend the hour at the Apple Store.

You drop the phone off, leave, and come back at literally any time more than 1 hour later. Go to your important meeting. Do some shopping. Have that doctor's appointment you've been putting off. Have a nice long lunch. Whatever. You don't actually lose that hour.

I mean, obviously.
I was an exchange student at UCSB for 1 year. The US government caused me a lot of visa issues because I didn't have $25,000 cash, which meant that I couldn't get a job and had to pay $900 in fees for a visa application that was eventually denied.

Due to family issues, I also wasn't getting support from my parents that year.

AS CAB (the Associated Students Community Affairs Board) gave out free hot dogs on Tuesday nights to people who attended a lecture. The Engineering department had companies coming to give careers talks, where they gave out free pizza. There were free concerts by Storke Tower on Thursday lunchtime where free ice cream was provided. CAB also organised a breakfast for homeless people (including the legendary Pirate) in the park on Wednesday mornings. KGCC is a Korean Christian group that has food at every event. The ISA International Student Association has cookies on Friday afternoon every week, and ISI (International Students Inc, a Christian group) has a proper meal once a month.

Two other people (one from Europe, one from Asia) were attending all these activities, so we soon became friends.

One of them heard about free pizza being given away at the store at Buchanan when it's closing time. So we went down there, and sure enough, there was food. Every day!

This went on for weeks. But one time, we came too late. All the pizza and daily sandwiches, each wrapped in plastic, were already put inside a black trash bag.

That was my introduction to dumpster diving, which continued for the rest of that year.

The weird thing was that because my rent was pre-paid, I wasn't homeless - just completely broke. Transport wasn't too much issue because hitchhiking up and down the coast was quite easy.

I slept outside in LA during one of those travels, but after that, my dumpster diving friend told me about CouchSurfing. I now host the weekly CouchSurfing meetup, and have a guest staying today. So short-term accommodation was free too.

Meeting people at the homeless breakfast made me realise how was to their situation, though. There's nothing like praying "Give us today our daily pizza" and "Thank you for this food", when God is really the only one taking care of you.

America is a land of extremes. There are some incredibly wealthy people, but there's also poverty right next door. I think that situation breeds crime. My situation now is much more comfortable - I earn much less, but I feel totally safe not locking my bike when I go into a convenience store.
>The bias against PoC on dating sites is a serious problem

Why is it a problem? Is the bias against eating kale a serious problem? Is this bias against bungee jumping something that needs to be solved?
Welcome to the city of Gotham!

Jakarta feels like Gotham without Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne

And we just wait the mosnters come up from the tunnel
1. Blockchain technology could be theoretically used to secure elections.

Some example usage: When people register to vote, assist them with setting a key pair and allow them to enter their public key with their registration. They could then verify how their vote was counted after the election.

Not sure if it would be superior to paper voting still as it could then be used to buy votes, but maybe there are some narrow applications, or a multi-sig approach where someone could know, but not prove it is their vote without the help of a third party. It is still better than current electronic-voting in this scenario.

As a side note, there is definitely a use for public key registration associated with government identification as it would solve ID theft for good.

2. It could also be used for public records and secure/lower cost for chain of custody applications.
He is being sardonic. UPS employs some of the best minds in optimization. The case you mentioned is probably not that complicated for UPS.
There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date than 10 years.

Even the Internet was criticized by some after 10 years for failing to live up to “change everything” hype, and it’s true it hadn’t really close to doing so at the time. Some companies like Blockbuster Video weren’t a bit concerned for quite a while.

To me the current state of blockchain applications doesn’t tell us much about what it’s ultimate utility will end up being.
I've reached my article limit. What the fuck? Stop posting links to things which cannot be viewed without paying or without scamming them. I don't want to do either.
Russian submarine activity increases around Atlantic internet cables: report
For cutlery and dishes, one probably wants extras anyway to buffer for those days when they couldn't yet wash the previous day's dishes because they were too busy. We've all experienced it. Probably don't need guests to bring cutlery and dishes. But chairs? Probably no need to have personal buffer for chairs ever. And I'm not sure asking guests to bring their own chairs is the answer when guests come. Does everyone need to go buy folding chairs to be a houseguest now? How do hosts guarantee that the chairs would not damage specific carpets or hardware floors? Etc.
It seems like you made a big mistake when you did the simple calculations yourself, so we'd like to see YOUR work. Because if you actually did the simple calculations correctly, and if you actually did get the results you claim, then you should be to quite happy show your work to us. Or did the dog eat your homework? Are you suddenly so indignant about being asked for proof because you're just blustering, and demanding that other people do simple calculations you were too lazy and insincere to do yourself just to divert the argument?

How about instead of throwing the term "politically correct" around three times in the same post, you show us something "mathematically correct"?
I don't. Looks like a sham to me, speaking from personal experience.

I do sympathize with their goals, to protect their users from potentially costly mistakes, such as installing a software, which has the wrong license. Such as code like randlib, which was once published in the ACM magazine, and therefore has the interesting license restriction that it should not be used "for financial gain". Which would be a problem if you want develop commercial software. An even bigger problem would be to use GNU licensed software, go figure. But anyway, there should be a way to check licenses when you install potential "nonfree" packages. Apparently some people care about this stuff.

But the actual case was made against cpanm, which is the second perl package manager, in https://tracker.pureos.net/T277, because "cpanminus is a helper tool to download perl modules distributed as part of CPAN.
As such it is a domain-specific package manager, which potentially involves nonfree code - and is outside the control of PureOS.
The package should be blocked from getting included from Debian into PureOS."

This is of course a ridiculous stance on native package managers. And then you need to block besides all package managers (pip, cpan, npm, go, ...), also wget, curl and firefox/chromium. But I also feel a bit of sympathy over these concerns. Technically it's trivial to solve, because the CAPN database, as well as most other such package databases, pypi, php, npm, emacs, ... all have a mandatory LICENSE field, and the pureos-enabled package manager would just check this field, and then either warn or error.
So you'd need two additions: a list of licenses to warn about, and a policy: warn or error.

But discussing this with cpanm, the client in question makes no sense at all. The questions
would be, who decides what's non-free or not? PureOS, Debian, fedora or the FSF? Or some other entity which could decide on such issues. In this case it would be most likely PureOS. So they would need to help upstream development to decide how to implement such a new feature. It would cost about 1hr of work, but first you need to plan it.
give it a list of free licenses, or a list of nonfree licenses, which list is bigger? list or regex. SPDX?
Upstream has no idea. The bigger native packagers are much more important in such wide-reaching new policy decisions, such as npm or pypi, or emacs and cpan.

As it turns it this pureos fellow has no interest at all in solving these issues, and on the other side pypi also has zero interest into helping pureos with their goal. Interestingly the pureos guy said on the pypi ticket the complete opposite than on the pureos ticket. He is not interested to block pip from being distributed with pureos, even if pypi has many packages with nonfree licenses or unclear licenses. Same for npm.
Same for all other package databases and package clients.

So it looks like they just selectively picked the smallest packager from a random observance. They are certainly not interested at all in helping with the open questions to solve it for the users.
But users can decide by themselves. Look at the license. That's called freedom.
For a SegWit transaction they should have looked at fee/weight unit. Paying $8 for a transaction worth $60k is just being too cheap.
How is that any different than a blog post from Jeff Barr?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...

Totally agree that if you are only doing something exactly three times, probably not worth it. That being said when was the last time you were absolutely sure the requirements won’t change? Only the Sith deal in absolutes.
For 1: Do you need blockchain at all? Or do you need public/private key signing?
In the EU, since November 2017, wire transfers take 15 seconds (Disclaimer: some banks are still rolling it out).

Welcome to the world of the Single European Payments Area Instant Credit Transfer Scheme.
Easy to grasp, but it takes a heavy dose of KoolAid or a desperate need to satisfy existing ideologies to believe.
What happens if you charge your throttled iPhone. Does the performance improve while charging vs running on battery ?
> It's why I wish Tony Robbins would run for president.

When he isn't busy pushing real-estate bubble investing in Canada and other shady financial ideas. Whatever Robbins was 20 years ago, he isn't that any longer. I suspect he simply acquired the desire to make a lot more money with his platform, which lured him into becoming a financial guru. Lately he has been talking about Bitcoin, because he's now Mr Investing Guru.
Ask HN: What's the best present you ever received on Christmas?
I have a 15,12, and 9 year old...just looking for ideas that really left an impression years later.
I uploaded to Azure Notebooks in case anyone wants to run it w/o setting up an environment:

https://notebooks.azure.com/smortaz/libraries/advanced-numpy...

Click Clone, Sign in, then Run
The man inside was presumably just sorting packages. They train drivers to occasionally rearrange the next bunch of packages in order on the top passenger side shelf for quick access.

And this time of year the trucks are so over packed it takes a while to simply find some packages due to clutter and misloaded packages.
There’s also the USB-C adapter which can fast-charge iPhone/iPad quickly via Apple-specific charging protocol, which clearly provides much more power than than the battery does.
Worth noting that their on-time guarantees for ground packages went away starting on Cyber Monday, and all express packages (overnight, 2-day, etc) have until the end of day rather than the previous time-specific commitments.
> unwilling

Can't. I clearly said can't. It's irrelevant to my work and my work consumes all the time I can give to work before I burnout.

> but it's also a really effective way of filtering out the people who can't learn those things after a few weeks of practice, which is super important.

What's your source on that? Can I see the stats that say neglecting more talented engineers so that you don't have to deal with subpar engineers is better than having a larger amount of more talented engineers while having to intermittently deal with subpar engineers? We have brilliant engineers where I work and the average and subpar engineers are in and out inside of a month or two. Didn't seem to hurt us at all in being the leader in our industry.
Just checked. Scandinavian countries, Australia and Luxembourg have higher median household income than the U.S.
Where would you register all the votes and verify the counts? The blockchain would help secure that database from an actor targeting votes of people not likely to verify their votes.
Patrick talked about what he was doing so much on the internet so much that people knew he was good at it. He also talked about it at meet ups and conferences, first with other normal attendees and eventually on stage. Eventually some of those people offered him money to do it for them.

At first he undercharged, not as a tactic to start consulting but because he didn’t have confidence in what he was selling. I believe he started off at $5,000 and stopped consulting when he was charging $30,000 a week.

But most of his work came from pitching people. Write an email or make a call to a company that seems a good prospect and follow up. If five percent convert you’re doing pretty well. You also get referrals from previous satisfied customers.

As well as that Patrick wrote a lot on his website about what he did and how to do it, which functioned as a proof of competence and lead to some people contacting him to ask him to work for them. Authority, Nathan Barry, is all about this publicising proof of competence tactic.
Ask HN: Any lessons learned from running a hacker space
Thinking about the new year and resolutions makes me also think of lessons learned.

This is Hacker News. So can anyone share any lessons learned about running or working with a hacker/maker space? Please share things that worked and more importantly things that didn't work.
>I want to note that many so-called “arbitrage” systems are actually sleeves for another important risk: liquidity

Very true, especially with altcoins. In my experience, big deltas have been results of things like withdrawal suspensions.
> The public database must be writable (only) by the corrupt authorities. What exactly does a blockchain do to make the authorities non-corrupt here?

Wrong. In selling land to somebody else, authorities -- corrupt or not -- have
nothing to say. The only thing authorities are needed for is to put an
official stamp on the sale document.

This official stamp is generally a good thing; land is too valuable, so such
transactions need some friction, like public notary's involvement, so one
cannot sell a property by merely clicking "accept" under EULA. Corrupt
authorities, as I understand, can delay the process of stamping the sale for
indefinite time, so what blockchain is supposed to do here is to do away with
authorities altogether.
Those whose attractions to people and whose relationships with them are more akin to shitting will have an easier time remembering and applying that one. Though people for whom that's the case, probably don't care.

Meanwhile those with good intentions and good relationships (even ones that eventually turn to shit) will see nothing at the outset to remind them of the old saw. They don't intend to shit, anywhere.

Also, if we're trying to decide here which primitive need to prioritize (sex vs. food) then sex is going to win every time, because at least for males, it's far more valuable to the species (in the evolutionary selection sense) than his procurement of food. If a male starves to death after passing his genes on, those genes march on, downward through time. (Not that a hapless office drudge and would-be harasser or uncomfortable-maker will necessarily end up passing any genes on, but his sex drive doesn't know that. That drive is pretty dumb in general.)

Still, I agree with your point. Maybe better & more instructive is just to "keep work professional" and leave it at that. Sounds a little dry perhaps. But work should be dry. All these companies that keep demanding "passion" and try to be your mom and best friend and social life all wrapped into one, are asking for trouble. Your life doesn't need to be a Greek myth. Get back to work.
Tried to steal but didn't steal?
3 years of OS and security updates is actually quite good for an Android phone relatively speaking. Qualcomm doesn't usually agree to support their SoC's for more than 2 years so getting an extra year out of Qualcomm must have been expensive. And therein lies the problem - Google has been beholden to Qualcomm to update their drivers for every major release of the OS. Perhaps this will change now that the Linux kernel has 6 years of LTS and Android 8 and onward now allow the OS to updated without modifying the kernel, but who knows.

One interesting note is the length of support Intel has provided to the Nexus Player. First released in 2014 on Android 5 it recently received Android 8 in 2017. It's too bad Intel is out of the mobile SoC market because their level of support has been unparalleled by any SoC manufacturer.
Fedex does the same, and I think many of those are actually used for home delivery.

A few years ago, I saw UPS deliveries in my neighborhood being done via a tiny trailer on a bicycle.
Mining my way to grad school: an experiment in collaborative mining
There's no conceptual difference. The only consequences difference is the fear being espoused on here that Walmart or similar could frequently abuse it as an extortion point (and that given their scale, it could become a terrifying beast of a problem; such that even if Walmart weren't directly doing the extorting - which they're unlikely to do - others in the system would).

For example, you get a person in the Walmart system, a guard or whatever, that has records on people that have commited crimes in Walmart. Joe Consumer gets caught shoplifting and pays a fee for it to go away, and doesn't get turned in to the police. Now, the security guard with the profiles starts going outside the framework and begins blackmailing people like Joe. These will mostly be poorer people and are very easy to prey upon in such a scenario.
>Lee also notes in her study that, on closer inspection, food deserts don’t actually exist in the U.S., at least not as a national problem—on average, poor neighborhoods have more grocery stores than wealthier neighborhoods.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/02/food_deserts...
After reading this comment I went ahead and read the article. I am having trouble finding a case where it seems like the tests are biased in Postgres’s favor but I don’t know very much about MongoDB so could be missing something.

Large numbers of clients — really, any more than there are cores — are notably not a Postgres strength.
> At the best of times there is some pretty horrid anti-Chinese xenophobia

No, at the best of times China is discussed as an exciting place where cool tech is happening.

Horrid xenophobia would be the worst of times. Or are you saying HN has something even worse than that for China?

As for people believing exaggerations about the Tiananmen Square Massacre: sorry, not sorry. If China wants there to be a measured and accurate public accounting of that then they can participate in the free and open discussion of that history. As long as they continue to murder or otherwise destroy the life of anyone who discusses it, the consequence is that people are forced to guess what happened. Too bad.
You can't but there are some options for a long term visa, easiest is an elite visa where you pay a few thousand dollars for 5 years of stay. Cheaper is a visa to take lessons in Thai language, that way you can get a visa for a few years.
> Customers want to pay lower prices for delivery, even to the extent that the reliability of delivery around busy dates will slip.

Typically there's a money-back guarantee for late delivery, but those are either eliminated (for ground) or extended (for express) during the holiday season.
This article is generally why I'm optimistic about Bitcoin and blockchain in general. A reasonably well-informed person can have all the facts and yet still not get it.
> undoubtedly benefits for consumers when you have a decentralized marketplace

I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is the idea that corporations are willing to give up that much control over their copyright so that consumers get some false impression that they "own" a Pikachu.

Where are you going to see that Pikachu? Through officially-licensed Nintendo software. Not through third party apps and websites. They will get hit with the DMCA hammer.

There is no benefit of the blockchain, when all representation of that data is centralized. Nintendo won't do it because, who cares. Other than a buzzword, the blockchain is irrelevant. That's like caring about whether a website is running on Ruby or Node, or some other stack. It doesn't matter. It's an implementation detail.
No, this is not what happened at my google interview.
Some poor HR guy, without any tech background read questions from his screen, and tried to match my answers with his answers. When I gave a too good answer on something he said "no wrong, next question". Ridiculous interviews. Twice.
That's why I can relate to Max Howell.
It's still fundamentally development for the marketing side of a business though, rather than development for the product side. I think the problem that people are struggling with is that they can't see how this information relates to them if they are software developers looking to do consulting work on software. Patrick's article really is from a marketing angle, even though there is a software development component to it.

That said, I think people are missing the key takeaway from the article. I think the most important thing in the article is right there in the heading "Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time". This is saying that you should frame your services in terms of a value proposition for the client. That is, how much money will you save them if they hire you to do X. Maybe X is "rewrite the backend to process transactions quicker" which will save them Y hours of compute time and reduce their AWS bill by Z a month.