skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finding a job with no university degree in Southend is not as easy for him as you may think.

More importantly, the job likely won't be much better than what he has.

The point isn't so much that the job sucks and that he can find something else. For me the article says something about the very nature of many 21st century jobs at 'innovative' 21st century tech companies.

I mean, the pay ain't that bad, it's quite similar to median daily wages in the US for example. The issue is that he's working with robots, doesn't talk to people or even his parents, is unable to keep up a social life, sleeps during his off-time and is basically miserable.

Now what do you think happens when he leaves that job? Someone else will take his place. Maybe at a marginally higher rate, if enough people are reluctant to take the job. But inherently, that's not a job we should be having in one of the richest countries on the planet. There's no issue with menial labour, but we surely must be able to design our work/life balance better than for people to lose interaction with other human beings, losing passion for their hobbies, sleeping their time on this earth away when they're not working like a robot.
Why do you immediately think you're supposed to feel sorry for him? Yet at the same time you come across as entitled enough to insult this guy for sharing his story.

Wise words I learned long ago: "Never pass up a chance to keep your mouth shut".
First world governments created rules in the 1800's and 1900's. People used to work in unsafe conditions doing jobs in the coal mines and steel mills.

This isn't an abusive job. It's just a working job. You can't leave your station at an automotive factory or in a line cook position either. You have to keep moving for 8 hours or more at a time. It's work. That's just how it goes. It's not for everyone.
Care to share your setup? Perhaps via a Gist?
Clinical trial finds blood-plasma infusions for Alzheimer’s safe, promising
- Weather data (tabular)
- Satellite imagery (lots of providers, lots of different bands)
- Forex currency pairs (70 pairs)
- Cryptocurrency pairs
- Crime data
- Macroeconomic indicators
- Fuel prices
- Bitcoin trades
- P2P downloads
- Twitter feeds

those are just off the top of my head...
He needs to keep working there just until he finds something better. If his Amazon shift is the best he can find, I’m glad it’s available to him. With no job opportunity he would also lose his government benefits.

Amazon is providing a huge service to offer jobs with such a low entry requirement. The alternative is not a better job — as he says, there isn’t one or he would leave and take it in a millisecond. The options are Amazon job and government benefits or no job and no benefits.
While I agree and personally prefer IRC, people using slack use far more features than just channels and PMs. That's because slack is more discoverable and the features are generally conceptually simpler and more obvious for the average user than complicated IRC features. That's the UX I was talking about above - it allows more users to use more features and feel more comfortable that they know what is going on. The same really can't be said for IRC - most average users will request the help of an 'IRC master' if they need something they don't know how to do. That's probably not a good sign of accessible UX.
Kroger seems to follow the same playbook from what I can see. Locally, they are often sold out of common produce such as lettuce. Even dry and canned goods are a crap shot. The other night I was looking for canned white beans and the entire shelf section was empty. It's frustrating. They are basically the only grocery option in the area and they do enough business to carry a little extra inventory. As it is now, if I happen to be in an area with another option I'll shop there. This is costing them some amount of business.
Having a Baby in US. I will definitely give my insurance provider a call. They didn’t pay much for the OB and I work for a very solid tech company.

America’s healthcare is a f*ing joke. It’s riddles from the top to bottom with people who want to leech money at every step and provide the most minimal service.

I had a slight fracture in my scaphoid. I paid $2000 out of pocket and insurance paid half of that.

In Australia where I don’t need employer golden handcuffs for health insurance, it would be less than a third of that.
What's the racial make-up of this violence in Sweden Vs the US? Sweden should have zero spots that rival US cities for violence.
Do you have proof of that?
Right, but no part of Uber's "argument" depends on the support of HN users. You can't say that, at least not cleanly, about organizing SFBA software developers.
So wait, we're going to have people just stare south for 8 hours a day? How is this not 'government waste'?
Here's one take-home message: if you made up a country which was 10% like Venezuela and 90% like Germany, then it would have murder stats double the USA.

It would also have a GDP much like the USA, and would qualify for the OECD.

Obviously this is just about how averages work -- the high violence stats of the 10% can completely skew the average, but their low income stats can't. But it's worth remembering, every time someone tries to tell you what an outlier among rich countries the US is. It's a large, diverse, country... and often different averages are telling you facts about completely different people & places.
>> now I work such anti-social hours, it’s difficult to meet up.

As your friends finish school and find jobs, some end up on different shifts and different schedules. Chances are you have things in common with your new co-workers, socialize with them.
> When we celebrate entrepreneurs like Bezos we should also keep in mind that this success comes on the backs of a lot of people who work in bad conditions.

Is there a case where this is not true? Capitalists are all the same: Ignoring other's suffering to make a profit.
> One thing I really want to be able to do with a blockchain system is to put my wallet in cold storage—like, in a safe

AFAIK, you can generate a paper wallet with any blockchain system. You're keys are rendered as a QR code and/or series of words (there is a name for this protocol that hopefully someone else can remember!), and you can then print and store it.

Hardware wallets are also a thing for some systems, such as Bitcoin.
No, but you can definitely try and only go to those that are.
It's not like that in most countries in fact. The US variance between high murder parts of high murder rate cities and the murder rate for the other 95% to 97% of the population is several times greater than other countries with comparable murder rates.

The murder rate among Sweden's largest cities does not consistently vary by ~20-30 fold top to bottom. That's the gulf between New York City and Baltimore, or Honolulu and St Louis, or Detroit and Austin TX. That extreme of a variance, is very unusual for all but a few countries.

Argentina for example, which is at least somewhat similar to the US in per capita murders in a given year, in their major cities you do not see Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago type examples of extreme outliers vs the ~6 national rate (eg Buenos Aires is typically around 5 or 6, as is Cordoba). Rosario, which saw a large murder rate spike in 2012-13, was considered shocking, because the murder rate went from ~10 to ~22 over a few years. So the US national rate is lower than Argentina, while having drastically higher outliers like Baltimore and Detroit versus eg Rosario (their bad case example).
Tuvi.io
Hello, I would like you guys give me some feedback about a project I'm working on. I wil no explain what the Tuvi does in order to validate the effectiveness of my landing. Let me know:
1. If you get what Tuvi does
2. What do you think?
3. What potential problems you see
4. Some improvements or things I should take into consideration before launching.

The link is https://tuvi.io
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16189432
I run https://byuu.org using C++. Not just for page generation, but also for the server itself. It's all a single package, so no CGI is involved. Although I do use nginx as an HTTP->HTTPS proxy because TLS is scary. It's handled being linked on the front page of a few major sites with no issues.

In my case, I just prefer coding in that language over PHP et al. It's on a $2.50/mo VPS and I can spawn a new instance in five minutes if need be. Every memory access (for strings, vectors, etc) go through containers with bounds checking. The server/webapp itself runs as its own unprivileged user. If the server crashes, it'll stay offline and give me a core dump, which should let me find and fix the bug in my library.

The code's open, too: https://gitlab.com/higan/higan/blob/master/nall/http/server....

It's certainly not 100% perfect security, but what really is? Between Heartbleed, Meltdown, Spectre, weekly Wordpress exploits, etc ... I don't think the risk is particularly higher.

(aside: the forum runs on PHP on another VPS instance; separation of security concerns.)
Reminds me of Soviet Russia. Bad central planning + strict bureaucratic rules & penalties causes empty store shelves.
> His life is pretty sweet.

No, it is absolutely not. I cannot see how being forced to live with one's mother, unable to quit the current job to get higher education is "sweet". It's things like these that keep poor people poor and make rich people richer.

What happens if he wants to start a family? It's impossible to responsibly raise children in those conditions if he doesn't do it with someone that is a lot better off than him. Social mobility is quite hard for men, so the chance is very slim that his children will not grow up poor, too.
Machine learning to program synthesizers and guitar effects
At some point you have to have confidence in what you know (right or wrong). You can't be trying every darn thing.

Wait does JS really have curly braces? Not sure now, I haven't read the spec from cover to cover three times; better go try it.

Okay, super exaggerated example (but I like those; they get the point across).

Also, empirical approaches can appear to confirm intuitions that are wrong; like printf("%d %d\n", i++, i++) producing the wrongly expected answer.
There’s other job that this guy (and many others like him) are qualified for. I’d rather he shuffle boxes than just get UBI and contribute nothing.

Ideally he would shuffle boxes the mandatory minimum work hours required to keep his government benefits and spend an additional 40 hours a work studying & training for something better paying.

Career advancement isn’t going to be handed to you on a fucking silver platter. This guy has a good life and works is fairly safe and low stress conditions, is paid fairly, and isn’t trying terribly hard to become better. What else was I supposed to take away from the article?
I shop at Amazon too because it's so convenient. But I am becoming more and more aware that companies who rely on underpaid workers create huge externalities for society. A polluter can also potentially produce cheaper goods but these come at a price for society. Same for companies like Walmart and Amazon.
How do you build long-term valuation models in crypto?
And email me with questions bootrino@gmail.com
In Australia I believe my cousins got $10k per child from government.

Those were great times.
C++ advocates often talk about the performance gains. The problem with that is that what C++ buys you is not better performance or even predictable performance, but repeatable performance, which is not that useful for anything not hard-realtime.

For typical large OO codebase some kind of tracing GC is almost always better than various reference counting and tracking schemes. For the unpredictability the problem has to do with the fact that even simplest C++ statement might cause the compiler to generate several kilobytes of inlined code.
You can find supplemental income: do something with your hands, provide services, etc. You have all day to do that. It shouldn't be that your time is worthless and nobody is willing to pay anything for it.

People are positing that we need UBI because jobs are outright going away and there will be no paid work to be found. If it is possible to create earning opportunities in the post robo-job-pocalypse, then why can't we focus on restructuring work to begin with?

I wish people would pick one. Either it will be possible to keep earning money somehow, in which case we don't need UBI to replace jobs and we can, instead, focus on restructuring work to improve quality of life generally. Or it won't be possible to find earning opportunities, in which case UBI is all the money you will
have.
I wonder which, if any, government organizaations knew about this. Did the DoD know? Russia? China?

I remember reading about a "cyperweapon" the US government was using to cause North Korean missile tests to fail before launch. Could attacks like this be possible through meltdown?
How about pointing to several hundred years of systemic slavery and oppression without any meaningful reparation efforts?
Indeed. And it's useless to pretend that's not the case.
That's exactly the reason for this policy. One of many reasons, actually.

But it actually is meant for things on regular shelves, it doesn't apply to the produce department, which is what all the pictures in this terrible article show. It also doesn't apply if the product is going to be out-of-stock for a known period of time. It's meant for situations where the buyer didn't order enough and it will only be out for a day or two.
Amazon is wildly expensive compared with Target and Costco. Its success is convenience and extensive product reviews.
In this case he does work with robots so I’m not sure this really applies...
Thank you, this is a lot more like what I would have written in my initial comment had I not been feeling so laconic.
It's not a true point because Amazon could not easily choose to hire more people for the workload, given the assumption that people will choose to shop wherever they get the lowest prices. The assumption seems valid considering the domination of Walmart and Asda in the past few decades. The margins on retail are tiny as it is, so I highly doubt Amazon could easily hire more people.
>xenophobic

Yeah there's no way any friendly, rational person can look at Mexico and possibly come to the conclusion of "no thanks, I'd prefer not to have that here".

Mexico has no problem with extreme prejudice towards the rest of Latin America. Policies that people would decry x1000 if the US did them to poor Mexicans. But somehow the US applying some basic restriction to Mexico is "xenophobic" among other horrible phobias.
I'm also under Intel NDA and it took them days to provide any meaningful guidance at all.

The only useful thing in these documents was a timeline/detailed list for the microcode patches, all of which should be public.

They also claim that Spectre/Meltdown are "not a bug or flaw in Intel products" and their slide deck has a whole slide dedicated to forward-looking statement disclaimers. Sigh.

Needless to say, we're not impressed.
The minimum salary in the UK is roughly £12k/year... He's still making 50% more than the lowest paid employees.
What actual data can be extracted by a Meltdown/Spectre attack? Still need to find an answer to that, nothing online says anything specific.

Datacenters should probably be worried, but what about the hundreds of millions of users out there? Doesn't seem like a big deal, tbh - until an actual exploit is out there, why should they worry?
A Highly Scalable Website Analysis Tool Using Lambda and API Gateway and S3
I’m sure that’s true, and it’s great if you’re the army or Amazon.

I’ve read Andy Grove’s account of the thinking behind the response to the Pentium math bug. I expect better from Intel. As a customer somewhere between an individual PC builder and Amazon web services, I don’t think they handled this incident well at all.
Stock/inventory management seems like a great, although tough application for computer vision. A decent way to estimate how much broccoli is left without human intervention would facilitate automated ordering and eliminate rules like this one.

The title of the article is also misleading - they're not halting restocking of goods, they've just instructed employees not to patch over gaps with other products.
C++ only has repeatable performance if used in certain ways.

> various reference counting and tracking schemes.

Reference counting doesn't always have repeatable performance.

Maybe for a program image started from scratch on exactly the same non-real-time input. But then almost anything has repeatable performance for that, including ordinary mark-and-sweep garbage collection.
Low-Latency Video Processing Using Thousands of Tiny Threads [pdf]
While I don't agree with many of his ideas, it's admirable that someone is so adamant about following his ideas and not making compromises.

I strongly agree on his views about not having children though: https://stallman.org/articles/children.html
What an appalling reasoning.

You realize you could replace 'worker' with 'serf' and 'Amazon' with 'feudal lord' in that post and it would be a shining defence of feudalism?
The (Unnecessary?) Art of Connector Crimping
Yeah, you're right. Always have everything legal figured out before even starting your business, especially in the EU, no matter the cost. Good advice that everyone should follow.
>The issue is that he's working with robots, doesn't talk to people or even his parents, is unable to keep up a social life, sleeps during his off-time and is basically miserable.

hmmm why does this sound familiar.
From what I see going on in logistics robotics, I give it two years for anything shipped in box with a bar code, especially if incoming freight is palletized.
The headline hints--to this non-industry reader--at a dark ulterior motive, like perhaps driving customer behavior by suggesting scarcity. But I would welcome a policy that leaves the cilantro shelf space empty rather than fill it with parsley.
Jealous of such an experience. In my undergrad experience in the early 2000s, when things such as distributed computing came up in the higher level classes, it came with no context. The professor basically handed out, "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", had us read it, and went straight in to minutiae. It wasn't until years later when it came full circle and I understood better how those things applied to computing problems I'd actually face.

Kids have it so much better now with the amount of open courseware/material out there so they can learn from the best, and most passionate teachers, and not just have someone jam through powerpoint so they can get back to their research.
Given how long I've had the misfortune of working with JS, I can't believe I wasn't aware of the `dataset` one!
Insurance can put whatever number they want to make you feel you got a great deal.

It’s like car sales people showing fake papers about how much the car cost them. “They are selling to you at cost”.

There is absolutely no way a simple hand X-ray costs multiples of thousands of dollars.
Do not think is just limited to "Capitalists"
This is what happens when you mix data with people.

From what I can see you have top down management that wants to use data to make decisions. Those decisions affect people, the customers.

What few big data companies understand is that you cannot always approach things like this.

It does look sloppy, and it looks stupid. As a consumer I would go somewhere else.
"employer chooses to require it's employees be members of a union" and "a group voting to unionize and then forcing their agreement onto other employees that don't want to be represented."?

So you're cool with unions enforced by dictators but not unions enforced by democracy?
You don't need a simulation, there are recordings of actual arcades from the 80s. E.g., http://www.coinopvideogames.com/sounds.php

Tempest, recorded in 1982: http://www.coinopvideogames.com/mp3/videogames01/11-tempest....
>humans are largely drawn to these things that represent or require the toil and suffering of invisible anonymous masses. It’s weird, but it seems fundamental to humanity.

Consumers are largely drawn to low-cost products, which require the exploitation of masses. It is fundamental to capitalism, but not to humanity.
Ethereum has something along these lines in production; it's how they get higher throughput and 15-second block times.
Yes. What these predictions assume is that there will be a massive orders-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of space transportation. The moon rocks brought back from Apollo missions are estimated to have cost NASA over $50K per gram (see https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting-apollo17.ht...). Gold is only $40/gram currently.
Pretty much the whole of human activity is spent on managing scarce resources in one way or another. Most things that have reduced this "burden" have been to the betterment of society (on the whole, of course there have been local winners and losers) so there is no reason to believe that some new form of scarcity reductions will not also follow this trend.

I think the major flaw most people make in this area is assuming that the current situation is the optimal and any disruption is inherently bad -- e.g. gold has always been scarce so it must always be scarce. Bastiat talks about this phenomenon with his "that which is seen and that which is unseen" theory one could argue.

--edit--
Bastiat link -- http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
Supreme Court Takes Up Internet Sales Tax Conundrum
> c++ web site would be

No "would" about it C++ web sites are real and have been around for a long time. I'm thinking of sites running on Windows using "ISAPI".
Cutelyst is a nice C++ web server with a much better api imho: https://cutelyst.org/
No, there isn't. Which is why average workers openly supporting rich people and dissing Health and Safety rules surprise me. They're there for your own protection, created by decades of hard work by hard workers who know how easy it is to get fucked by a company.
Area 51: Why America keeps it as a secret?
> Do you know that Go's GC is way less advanced than Java GC as of today? This is admitted by Google's Go team lead.

I won't comment on the other points - but I managed a medium sized Cassandra cluster for a couple of years, and the GC point is valid. It has nothing to do with Java's GC being more advanced. It's easier to bypass the Go GC with stack allocations (not possible in Java), and many of Cassandra's processes (compaction, repair) end up being very GC heavy. GC tuning ends up being a function of your workload and if you ignore it, background processes like repair can adversely affect projection nodes, or throw nodes in a loop. - and adversely giving the node more memory can make things worse. Cassandra has left a bad taste in my mouth for Java-based databases.
Ok...so...he described what it's like to have a job. And...

I'm not understanding the point of this. It's too bad his job sucks and he's discovered working takes your free time and joy for life. I will take my tiny violin and play him some Fallout Boy and Greenday covers while he cries for me.