skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I expect there to continue to be multi-ethnic cities and neighborhoods within cities, which is a fairly common occurrence throughout history, particular in capital cities of empires, which is what I would describe New York as. There is no doubt that some people (particularly smart people) highly value the diversity and cosmopolitanism that cities of this form provide. On the other hand, people who value high social trust and stronger social identity would probably prefer to living in more homogenous (and less urban) environments.

It seems to me like the american continent, anyway, is large enough to give everyone what they would like, without either interfering with one another politically.
Great news, for sure. But was that a result of the tech boom, or government policies? I'm betting on the latter. And the fact that the lowest rungs of the economic ladder aren't fixed in an absolute sense doesn't change the fact that an increasingly enormous share of the wealth produced by humanity globally is going to just 1% of the population.
SoftBank has a minority, 15% stake. Will they really have enough authority and juice with the other board members to execute a boardroom coup?
>>> real people who need these things.

That word, need, the the heart of the pain issue. Often they don't need it in the sense that they will not die if they don't get it. Pain itself rarely kills. Conversely, the stats are now pointing to patients living shorter lives on opioid than not. So an argument comes that they really have no medical need. But nobody wants to live in a world with so many people in chronic but treatable pain. That's just mean. I have no medical need for lidocaine but it sure makes having my tooth drilled less horrific. Balances need to be struck. Balance is not an easy word when dealing with addictive substances.
Which wireless router can make your life easier???
Does the cost in maintaining/paying for hub airports factor into why airlines are regional? For example southwest has service over most of the US because they use the older/cheaper airports vs United has hubs that don't heavily overlap with American. I don't see the parallel with ride sharing here.

I think Uber/Lyft can take over the whole US since they don't need to maintain much supporting infrastructure. Plus they can get economy of scale in marketing.
It's because that's the way English verbs are conjugated. English actually has a very simple way of conjugating (regular) verbs. Most of the complexity of the ancestral Germanic has been lost. Contrast that to other Germanic languages. Swedish present tense, for example, is very simple. German still retains a complex morphology.

The only inflection English retains in the present indicative is the -s suffix for 3rd person singular (frog). Third person plural (frogs) does not have an -s.

The -s suffix for noun plurals, and for possessives (vestigial genitive case), add exceptions that make learning English a little harder.

Edit: grammar :)
Are they not just buying common stock or Series Seed/A/B stock from existing investors?

I'm under the impression this is a totally different class of stock than the $70B valuation round?

Common stock at a $49B valuation is entirely different from preferred stock at a $70B valuation with what I'll assume includes a lot of "fine print" around pro-rata and/or liquidation preferences.

Feels a little clickbait-y to say the valuation took a haircut when we're talking about different classes of stock.
I think you are on to something looking at state governments but I don't find the answer completely satisfying because a lot of US States are similarly sized to European countries. Why should we expect the State of NY (~20M people) to have a worse government than the Netherlands (~17M people)? I don't have a great answer to this question.

Perhaps it's just the separation of government in general. People can only pay attention to so much and the attraction of national politics pulls attention away from state politics. That's just not something that happens in many other places.
They can just wear a helmet. Lead lined balaclava?

They also mention that is not a showstopper and that it can potentially be countered with entertainment and exercise.

It also remains to be seen what the effect is like on humans. Might be negligible on a mars trip.
This is basically the goal of meditation (mindfulness meditation in particular). I'd give that a try. At first, it will probably feel like your lack of concentration makes meditation impossible, but that's actually completely normal and even sessions where your mind won't sit still can be productive in the long run.
Thanks for the tip, this is indeed something I'd be proud of :)

I decided arbitrarily to make every post self-contained inside a single HTTP request, and it's nice to see this single decision is already 99% of the job.
Meditation is, essentially, concentrating on one thing (e.g. one's breathing, a phrase) for an extended period. It's kind of like using a piece of gym equipment to exercise just one set of muscles, repeatedly. So, how does one increase attention span? Practice paying attention, in an environment with fewer distractions, and keep practicing until you become good at it again (don't expect that to happen quickly).

Also, you accidentally put "it" instead of "I" in the question. Perhaps related?
I wasn't talking about mars colonization, I was talking about mars exploration. That study isn't going to deter the first explorers. Only about 10% of Magellan's expedition survived, and not Magellan.
This is an inherent property of all market cap weighted indexes. An alternative approach is equal weighted indexes, which have historically outperformed market cap weighted indexes. There's no free lunch though: this is a case of your typical risk/reward tradeoff. Equal weighted funds are more risky (volatile), but have higher historic returns than market cap weighted funds.

Some of them feature equal weighting across industry sectors as well as amongst separate companies. Here's an example of one (also note the high fees): https://www.guggenheiminvestments.com/etf/fund/rsp-guggenhei...

I personally just stick with VTI and VXUS for stocks (excluding my Airbnb & other startup shares), but I also have about 50% of my net worth in crypto (and I remain bullish).
We already have this, though: cooperative businesses. The most common being credit unions. Some grocery stores operate on this principle.

It's a good model and has been scaled up to large multinational corporation size in the Mondragon Corporation, but we don't need blockchain or cryptocurrency to do it.

I've been incredibly well-served by both credit unions and cooperative grocery stores.

Corporations exist to serve the interests of their shareholders. If you are a customer or employee of a corporation that you are not a shareholder of, then that corporation is not necessarily trying to do business in my interest but quite possibly could be operating at the expense of my interests in order to serve the interest of the shareholders. We hope that these interests are aligned, but often we see that they aren't. Cooperative businesses naturally align these interests by making the workers or consumers (or both) shareholders. And they remain voluntary.

It addresses many of the drawbacks of unionization, of traditional capitalist corporations, and socialism. It really should be copied more widely. Given my positive experiences with the cooperative business model, I would gladly seek out such businesses if they were more widely available.
> This is a bit ridiculous, as the questions aren't specific.

The issue is the editorialising the results, and not providing the other questions they asked, the actual results, or a more detailed description of the methodology.

If they did that we could ignore the article and potentially discovery something useful in the results.

> Also, what is a SQL server reporting system doing asking people about sexual harassment?

That's gone over my head.
> Then, the new insurance laws in 2008 and 2010 transformed what had largely been a government-funded and charitable-minded field into an enticing for-profit business.

That's freaking discussing and yet another reason I refuse to pay for insurance. I'll take the fines.
That's correct. A Sublime UI theme is on the backlog!
People who live in these will be real pioneers and I don't think there will be anything glamorous about it (thinking more modern caveman rather than moon base alpha). I think the people who go will have to be crazy, wreck less and have a death wish, however I totally encourage them to do this.

I'm a big fan of space, but I don't see me going there until something better than rockets are invented and all the other many problems are solved so I can just sit at a nice coffee shop and enjoy the view.
Ah, good point. Here's confirmation of that from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-said-to-c...

For the people who have options, some could still be entirely wiped out by this, but it's not as big a problem for new hires.

It's still a problem, though. As the Reddit discussion makes clear, people are benchmarking against things like Google. The equivalent equity package from Google 2 years ago would have gained 30% in value, while the Uber one has lost 30%. Assuming $200k in equity from each place, that's $260k for Google and $140k for Uber, or nearly a 2x difference.

That would sure make me think about jumping ship.
Couple of points: (1) median would be more insightful in this context than average and (2) neither do a great job of describing a range of situations like the term "middle class" does. Your point could be changed to "a family with average discretionary income could afford a few $130 per plate meals", but again my point is it's difficult to sweep that across a term that is increasingly describing a very broad range of financial situations.
Why do you expect that to happen? Most people use Facebook, Amazon and Google all the time and are perfectly happy with them, ads included. (Edit: added a couple more big companies)

Is there an example of another business sector that was radically changed due to massive public outcry? I can't think of any. There's tobacco, maybe, but that was a long slow process of government regulation, and the tobacco companies are still around.
What's the purpose of this $1B investment at a $70B fictional valuation given that everyone knows the actual valuation is $48B? Does it make the tax accounting better for someone somehow?

I'm with discordianfish in saying only 30% down sounds better than it could have been for Uber.
I proposed an alternate to the current estate tax here that I think is relevant:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947957
(ctrl-f "cap on inheritance")

"An exceptionally productive individual can generate billions, but then when he dies the money goes to his heirs which may not have done anything to deserve commanding that much wealth other than having been raised by (and having the genetics of) the exceptionally productive individual, which is a far cry from being exceptionally productive themselves.

My thought was to create a cap on inheritance. Enough so that the heirs would be able to live a normal middle class life without working, but not be disgustingly wealthy like the parent. ~$5 million seemed like enough to live off interest for a lifetime. I don't think productivity would be disincentivized too much by this, as the productive individuals still get to use their wealth as long as they're living. It'd probably be pretty difficult to plug all the loopholes but I think it's worth thinking about.

We could lighten some other taxes (income, property, whatever) for this increased death tax such that the overall government tax income remains roughly the same, to make the proposal more palatable. Overall, everyone keeps more of their wealth, and the playing field is leveled and we're a bit closer to an actual meritocracy."
That is a fantastic idea. Noted. Thank you!
Re: Password Hashing Competition: maybe, but I think there are some subtleties you're glossing over that are worth pointing out.

We have more confidence in scrypt because of the analyses PHC fostered. We (well, everyone not named 'cperciva perhaps :)) didn't really have a proper independent framework for analyzing hardness statements. So yes, scrypt is fine, but we say that with a lot more confidence because of PHC research.

PHC also matters for reasons similar to NIST password recommendations. Now if your questionnaire balks that I'm not using $x, I can say "go away, we are following $blessed_practice" as opposed to "we use this thing that this one dude wrote but it's the best we promise". It was the best, but dumb questionnaires still matter even if they're dumb. (Clearly PHC does not carry the same weight as NIST, but at least there's some semblance of authority and academic consensus you can point to.)

I agree that it's regrettable that the outcome of the PHC wasn't just "scrypt is fine, use it". Though a deployment model that isn't "go steal this .c and .h from this one tarball of a different application on this one site" is nice, and now there's significant impetus to make that happen.

> ... and a whole lot of new mechanism being proposed to find reasons to deploy it.

I don't understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?

Just so no-one misconstrues any of my points: I emphatically agree that the vast majority of people should just use what their framework gives them because it's probably totally fine.
Uber's main competitor in India is OLA cabs.

India is ripe for Ride sharing cabs. In major metros, OLA (specifically OLA Select) is the ride of choice for middle class youth. With free wifi and one hour work commutes common, the ola ride becomes time to get emails and secretarial work taken care of.
Yes, I think that's the one.
We’re fine in France, the downward pressure on middle class salaries have been compensated by good healthcare / a high minimum wage / a decent labor code, unlike in the US.

Sure it sucks if you’re a software engineer but as a minimum wage person you’re an order of magnitude better than in the US.
Chrome Apps Are Deprecated
The standard breath-watching practice you're most likely to encounter primarily targets samatha, which basically means concentration or freedom from distraction.
Indeed, they're investing at the 70B valuation and buying existing shares through the tender offer, at a discount.

Given that the latter shares are being sold by existing stockholders, it doesn't seem fair to call this a down round.

I'd expect their valuation to remain the same.
The deck is stacked at every turn, which is dangerous. The sad thing is that I've always had sort of a belief that "more open wins in the end", but that hasn't really been borne out in the mobile space. Apple and Google have built walled gardens where they always have the advantage in any space they want to operate in (even moreso than Microsoft during its rise to dominance, though they're slightly more subtle about how they wield that advantage to kill competitors). It's pretty much a battle of good vs evil all over again, and evil is winning. It's alarming that new markets are even worse. I haven't looked into the voice apps market for alternatives to Alexa, but I assume if Amazon thinks they can get away with acting this way, the rest of them are the same or worse.
You mean the war triggered by the Yugoslav nationalist who assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, with the goal of having Austria-Hungary cede the South Slav provinces to Yugoslavia?

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary :

> Austria-Hungary was a great power but it contained a large number of ethnic groups that sought their own nation. It was ruled by a coalition of two powerful minorities, the Germans and the Hungarians. Stresses regarding nationalism were building up, and the severe shock of a poorly handled war caused the system to collapse.

There is no clear single cause of WWI. Quoting now from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I :

> [Historians] look at such factors as political, territorial and economic conflicts, militarism, a complex web of alliances and alignments, imperialism, the growth of nationalism, and the power vacuum created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire, as a reminder, carried out genocide against several ethnic groups during WWI.

That Wikipedia page also points out:

> Senior German generals such as Helmuth von Moltke talked in apocalyptic terms about the need for Germans to fight for their existence as a people and culture. MacMillan states: "Reflecting the Social Darwinist theories of the era, many Germans saw Slavs, as especially Russia as the natural opponent of the Teutonic races".

and further says:

> Bénézet's book The World War and What was Behind It (1918) blamed on German aggression combined with perceived threats to the traditional social order from radicals and ethnic nationalists.
The success of Didi in China has been interesting. They have largely co-opted the taxi pools in Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen by allowing you to bid/pay the driver to pick up riders. It has changed dramatically in only a few years.

Although locals tell me it is illegal you can wait over an hour and a hundred green-lit taxis before one will stop to pick-up someone without an app that is willing to bid a few yuan. Train stations and airports have cues where you can still get a ride, but don't count on hailing a car in the evening even in a busy downtown district.

As a result they control all of the taxi business and all of the ride-shares. I must say not having to transact in cash is nice.
I had to look up this reference. So, thanks for introducing me to a new term. :)

I'm curious on how it applies. I have not been bringing in new questions. I can see how I probably left it too ambiguous in the start. I have not been trying to change it, though.
WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Which Is the Better Fit for Your Store?
Is the author implying that he himself is a "100x Engineer"?
34 never married no kids. Probably because the sentiment that someone doesn’t want to talk about family makes little sense to someone who’s life revolves around family. I give people blank stares when they talk football to me. I still try to relate. “Yeah my family chose all loser teams so the game lost me.” It’s not a great sentiment to hear for someone who loves football, but they get why I’m out of the discussion. Plus, as I remember being 31, the reality of adultness hadn’t fully hit me at that point. Life can catch up to you unawares. Sometimes I realize that in relation to other people’s progressions. That can hurt. Hurt comes out as dismissiveness vocally.
There is a basic meditation technique where you just lightly focus your attention on your breath. When you notice you’re not thinking of your breath, which will happen 10s to 100s of times a minute, typically, you bring your focus back to your breath.

It’s incorporated into a general school called “mindfulness” which you read more about. A book I’d recommend for beginners is “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

The theory is that training your mind to focus on something mundane like your breath for 10 minutes, you will generally train the capacity of your mind to direct focus.

This greater focusing ability will come in handy when you want to focus on other specific things without being distracted as easily, like listening to someone in a conversation or going through the debugging process for a bug.
There have been some reports that this is related to the graphics drivers. I don't know an easy way to disable the nvidia card, but perhaps disabling graphics switching in settings (so it always uses the fancy card) might help?

The only issue I've had on my 2013 MBP is a black screen if I plug in an external monitor while it's asleep.

Aside from that, it's been running fine. But I typically run it always plugged in to external monitor and some sources on the internet suggest that the secondary card is needed to run display port.
It depends how they hedge that investment. A 30% discount on the basis means you can be very aggressive with your hedge positions.

I'd say it's way too early to speculate yet...but somewhere within softbank, a risk manager is already planning on the whole deal to fail(that's his/her job), and how to keep the effects of that failure from being catastrophic.
But the bulk of the population shows little interest in attacking Big Tech, and as other commenters here have noticed, the government's willingness to step in and regulate has greatly diminished.
Former agile coach creates a board game to teach the concepts of Kanban
Europe’s willingness to step in has not greatly diminished. The US government is currently a dumpster fire, with predictable results.

As a US citizen, thanks Europe!
Thanks a lot for this! looking to give a try in 2018. How do you recommend understanding these tutorials?

Something like: understand a single video concept, do some programming on that concept, read a book(chapter) on that concept and then move on to next video?
The idea that Babel -- which I love and think has had an immeasurably positive impact on the front-end community -- is anywhere near as valuable to an individual company as their database is completely out of touch.

A database, for many many companies, is essentially the business. There's nothing more important. Babel, which again I love, at the end of the day lets you write more expressive code. Anyone who thinks fixing a bug that lets you write arrow functions instead of using `Function.prototype.bind` or whatever, is anywhere as important as a database... is just wrong.

Always remember your place. Your job is to make widgets for a company. Your productivity definitely has value, but don't overestimate how much value it has.

A better example would have been something like Resharper, which companies are willing to pay for, but they won't make its bugs an important part of their roadmap.
I think we need to be careful about integrating blockchain into the fabric of societies, especially the social and emotional aspects.

'Think not of how to replumb or rewire the world, but how to create the environment where interactions can be different, social, within a new economic order.'

This gets me thinking of the episode Fifteen Million Merits (S1, Ep2) of Black Mirror.
An Update to the LastPass Authenticator App
As I said in a sibling comment, I view race as too broad a concept to usefully generate social identity, and the fluidity of the concept makes it slippery to deal with. Your second point is a good one, I will think more about it. That said, it seems to me that in the long run relatively homogenous populations (really, many smaller politically independent homogeneous populations, as well as politically independent hetrogeneous populations for the smarter folks) is the best way to maximize social identity and minimize conflict.

By the way, I appreciate you taking the time to thoughtfully respond to my comment. It is difficult to say what I think may be the truth (with, I hope, no maliciousness) in todays environment, so thank you.
you likely wouldn't be eating with them on a regular basis
“Why do we need Facebook? Friendster already did social networks. Why do we need google? Alta Vista already did search.”

Crypto allows you to tokenize assets on a much more efficient, streamlined approach than structuring an entire business model in a formal co-op. The two are similar only in vague terms.
Mystery is a weasel-word and I suppose the article doesn't explain what is so mysterious about the universes existence, because if it would be explained, it wouldn't be mysterious.

Edit: okay, it's in the first paragraph, but still. Scientists are trying to detect new particles or particle interactions. Nothing new about that, superficially speaking. but it doesn't explain all of the big bang, maybe a piece of the puzzle, but not at all why it happened.
This is not quite correct. There are other weighting methods (specifically, equal weighting) which would prevent this situation, whilst still remaining passive.