skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How can anyone defend a $15 toll?

Lots of downvotes but this is actually a decent question. Why is the toll so high, and why don't east river bridges have tolls at all?

The answer has to do with the bridge construction process and ownership. The George Washington bridge was built by a "public authority": The Port Authority of NY & NJ.

As explained in Robert Caro's The Power Broker, the concept of a public authority was to allow a public entity to issue bonds for and manage the construction of a particular project, such as a bridge, with intent to turn the project over to the city once paid off. Other bridges were constructed via authorities that are now owned by the city, and the city chooses not to toll them.

Robert Moses, master governmental hacker of New York State, manipulated the concept of the authority by "renewing" bond issues the year before they expire, giving a single authority (in his case, the Triborough Bridge Authority) large amounts of money, which he then used to complete more public works projects, which could issue more bonds, and so on. The result is that this authority never dissolved, the works were never handed over to the city, and the tolls remain high, basically subsidizing the authority's other projects. He effectively created a public body with huge amounts of money that he could spend however he pleased, resulting in travesties like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

The Port Authority of NY & NJ, who collects the extortionate $15 toll on the GW Bridge, runs every bridge between NY and NJ, every airport, the PATH train, the airport Airtrains, and One World Trade Center, among other investments.

Effectively, the extremely high GW bridge tolls are subsidizing the PA of NY/NJ's massive losing bet on 1 WTC. And that's why it costs $15.
Weighing in as a Manhatto who works in midtown -- I welcome this! But another fruitful option is curbing the very worst behavior attendant to driving. Blocking the box -- apparently being policed heavily in Queens! [0] -- is typically addressed (near times square) by having traffic cops in the streets guiding traffic. How about tickets that scale up by orders of magnitude for each repeat offense, i.e. $1 for the first offense and $10K for the fifth and after that you lose your license?

The next thing I'd want to tackle is rampant honking. Not sure how to police this but it should probably cost $10 per second that your horn is making noise. that seems to me like a fair pricing of the externalities produced. And if you're honking to save someone's life i.e. if they're walking into traffic while looking at their cell phone -- ok that's a tough one.

[0] http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/09/21/ridgewood-ticket-trap...
IMHO your suggestion makes it unnecessarily easy for other journalists to distance themselves.

GOOD. If you're someone who works earnestly to report affairs objectively and without the influence of money to promote $thing_goes_here, it is absolutely an imperative for you and the integrity of your outlet and profession to call this behavior when it happens.
The fact that you need a throwaway to state the obvious is telling. There is no discussion anymore. Attack other people's opinions relentlessly, but have an actual honest discussion without losing your job and life.
I was very surprised to see a pub (Sean's) owned by Boy George on this list!
Are U Waiting to Be Hacked? Your Small Business Is More Vulnerable Than U Think
Lines have to be drawn frequently. It's okay to use a tazer or even a gun in some circumstances, others, not. With the torture case, we'd have to see that the benefit vastly exceeds the harm, and that reasonable measures were exhausted first. Beating a car thief to save the life of a child strikes me as a case where reasonable measures were exhausted and where the benefit vastly exceeds the harm.
Different doesn't equal better.
Show HN: Breadth First Growth – a newsletter for growing as a developer
The Panama Papers included some Tether documents, listing some of Bitfinex officers as shareholders and officers. That's more than just having an investor in common. While they may be separate legal entities, it looks like the same folks running both.
Christa McAuliffe’s lost lessons finally taught in space
Show HN: Its-Licious -- Helping Find Places to Eat
The most interesting thing in my opinion isn't that $100M of Tether is being printed daily, it's that it's still fairly consistently trading at above the face value of $1. Printing funny money is easy; keeping the price of your funny money from plummeting is much harder.
Jim Sterling, is that you?

To help avoid accusations of not adding anything to the discussion; Jim Sterling is a video games essayist who publishes well researched and presented polemic on the games industry on YouTube.
Great. Next you're probably going to tell me that Santa Claus isn't real either. :-(
I took a personal challenge to design and build a project from the ground up in a maximum of 48 total work hours. (I did it in 46.5)

I ended making a website to help people in Toronto find places to eat for an event called Winterlicious.
"Wash trading" and "Pump and Dump" in Bitfinex.
....and pay a 100$ an hour for parking?
I've been running my company as a globally distributed business for awhile now and I'd also emphasize #2 and #5.

Also, managing a 40 person team across many time zones created interesting communication issues. Be prepared to dial in processes far earlier than you would expect to need them and learn how to manage / archive conversations that happen in chat effectively. I've found that voice / video chat is still very challenging due to time zones, varying internet connections, and spoken accents vs text.

I definitely expect to see much more of this going forward though. Asian markets are on fire right now and many US companies, large and small, are focused on growth there.
I wish that TV shows and movies had to disclose which companies paid for product/brand placement.
The scenario I'm describing doesn't involve any sort of violence or torture, which again, makes me think you're missing my point or conflating my position with something else.
Why do you view the death of JFK as the inflection point?
Ask HN: Why should I use Flask?
I want to build an app that can help end-user search cars available for rent in the nearby area, and hire the car.
I think that's not any more fair than a direct charge. Or am I missing something?

From what I've heard well off families in Beijing will then just have multiple cars, one with an odd license plate and one with an even one.
Exactly. I look at it as following the Dreyfus Model. If you don't know what agile delivery looks like or how to approach it, you start with Scrum and follow it religiously. Once you get the feel and the team is accustomed, you can modify it to suit your needs or just wing it and keep the goals in mind.
Creator here: I started this newsletter on growing as a T-shaped developer after I didn't find anything similar online that scratched my itch. I try to do one or two small explorations a week in different areas of tech that I wouldn't normally come across in my day job as a front-end engineer, and I decided to send them out to others too!

I like the metaphor of a T-shaped developer, which is why I mention it on the site. I decided on "Breadth First Growth" as a cute way to convey the focus on growing sideways (and reference the search of course). It's mostly geared towards junior developers and those without a solid CS foundation, so although I might not recommend it for the average HN reader, I've heard good things about it from other junior devs and bootcamp grads. It's been great to make and share!

Happy to answer any questions! You can also check out past projects on our subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BreadthFirstGrowth/
> zone out, or read a book, or go on Reddit

Kind of? It can get pretty tight to the point where holding a book up is uncomfortable or not possible due to lack of space.

You only get internet at station stops and not in the tunnels, so it's a little bit tough to read Reddit. I usually get around this by pre-loading a bunch of essays I want to read.

Yeah, you can put on your earbuds and zone out. But it's dark down there, and given how short the days are in the winter, it doesn't feel nice to be trapped underground for so long. I'd honestly rather take a reliable bus (as if these even exist) in the morning.
On the contrary, I see artists choosing self-imposed limitations constantly. I do it myself, in whatever form I'm working in. As an example, a band I'm in sometimes plays "White Christmas", one of my favorite melodies. When I play the guitar solo, I have a simple rule for myself - I have to play the melody. Everything else can change. So instead of improvising melody, I'm improvising tone and expression. It gets great results. Other times, I might set a little rule for myself like "I have to play this solo using only these four notes".

Narrowing the range of choices through self-imposed limitations makes creative decision-making easier and more focused.

I get it as a photographer, too. Sometimes, I'll restrict myself to a single lens. Or I'll deliberately shoot film rather than digital, and limit myself to one or two rolls. It forces me to be more considered in my approach. I totally understand the wet plate thing.
Even on the desktop site it hides the navigation. It could use an index on the left -- not to mention that the entire law page is so brief that it does not need its own page.

Which one of those laws tackle UX bloat and ornament for ornaments sake?

The site is pretty, that's true, but it's not made to be a useful source of information, it's made to be pretty above all else. The entire site is a great example of what to do if you want to make information minimally accessible and create a vapid slideshow.
Amazon workers in Philly aren't going to make 160k. Tech salaries are much lower here than on the west coast, much lower than NY and Boston as well.
It's amazing how habit-forming driving seems to be. A friend was recently talking about a colleague of his who lives right next to a tram stop and works right next to another stop on the same tram line. 20 minute tram journey, tram every five minutes at peak time. And instead they drive an hour to work at rush hour, because they're from a rural area and are used to driving. Makes no sense to me at all...
Using Hadoop to Manage “Dark Data”
I can't believe it's been 32 years since the Challenger disaster happened. I was in aeronautics class in high school when I heard the news. The happy thought for the day is that her lessons will finally get taught.
A lot of street parking on Manhattan is free, if you know where to look.
Making things excessively difficult/painful without technically banning them has been found unconstitutional plenty of times as well:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/us/supreme-court-texas-ab...

We may not be quite at that point with air travel yet, but each year the TSA finds new and innovative ways to slow down the process and increase all-around misery.
Tharsis region?
Excellent points and very true to my experience. I like this. I like it so much I'm wary of it being the last word. Accounting for details & getting perspective elsewhere is incredibly important for solving problems.

But with details alone in mind it's easy to fall into the trap of "there must be 1 more detail I'm missing" ad infinitum.

If you do anything where you have to solve problems in a fixed period of time, it's important to decide when to pivot to a new, more productive problem (depending on the scale of your problem and freedom to change).

Take this advice or learn it the hard way.
I don't get it? That doesn't sound too bad. A brief interview with candidates, a short take home project, and then a final interview seems quite reasonable. There are tons of people applying for jobs, and companies want to make sure candidates care and are actually capable of programming; how else are they supposed to gauge someone's abilities? Just ask how merge sort works, then hand that Rock Star Software Engineer their 100k job?

I like this statement from the replies there: "People here really think a $90k job is owed to them for getting a piece of paper and meeting a few times and answering a few questions right."

I don't know how people are getting hung up on 4-6 hours for a task. I won't even rate any of my software tasks less than 2-4 hours in scrum, because I know that with planning and/or testing no non-trivial task takes just an hour.
What Are the Benefits of Buying Patio Furniture Covers?
Subway, bus, taxi, walk, bike, skateboard, ferry, ...

You can even take a helicopter some places.
Right. It's this commingling that makes the whole exercise futile. I can check and double check that I am buying from Amazon directly, but if fake goods are mixed in the same bin as real ones it becomes a game of roulette to see what I'll actually receive.
Show HN: Cape Town's Water Crisis: Visualizing South Africa's Historic Drought
"We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive." -MLK
FCC keeps faster definition of broadband and separates mobile from fixed
You have a false analogy. Traffic increases as the size of the road network increases, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

This is not the case for schools.
> I get the criticisms, you want the web to be homogenised and free from any form of expression that doesn't present every piece of information in it's most human-machine digestible form, I get it.

You don't get it, you just minimized and dismissed everyone's objections to this site.

As a power point presentation, this site is great. As a line item on your resume, sure.

As a resource that someone can use and reference, it's awful.
Universities aren't included?
100 Different Ways to Make $1,000
People who've earned enough to never work again all seem to keep working, though. While the most idle people I've ever seen are those who seem to have no chance of financial independence.

I don't think people are idle or lazy naturally. I think they become idle or lazy because they learn that nothing they do matters.

Being able to choose the work you do matters, which is why people don't "do nothing."
Micro Masters Degree in Emerging Automotive Technologies
I really disagree with this. Yes it’s crappy if you put in many hours and don’t get the job. Interviewing sucks for everyone. But having been on both sides of this equation (hiring and being hired), I believe the take home is the best chance to evaluate someone. They’re able to work without the pressure of someone staring at them and clock ticking, given google and all their normal ways of working, and something long enough to be able to more realisticly assess them.

It’s amazing what a short assignment can tell you about a person, and it makes the follow up on site productive because there are so many ways to ask about their work.

Personally for Apple I asked specifically to be given one of these instead of the whiteboard, as I get overly stressed in a “pop quiz” type setup. They still ended up pop quizzing me twice, and one of them I didn’t do well on. It was my take home that pushed me over the edge and got me hired.
I believe that it is tradition for the founding family to adopt the next generation head of the business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption#Econom...
Contrarian opinion: I think printing Tethers out of nothing is exactly the right policy right now.

The current price of USDT is $1.01 on coinmarketcap. In the past few days it went as high as $1.03. This is happening because people are using USDT as a safe haven from broadly falling crypto prices increasing demand. However, USDT is supposed to be pegged at a fixed $1 per tether. So if people are willing to sell their bitcoins to Bitfinex at >$1 then Bitfinex should take the deal. If the demand for tether goes away and the price drops <$1/tether, Bitfinex can use all the bitcoin they just acquired from their earlier sale of tether to start buying back tether.

In the process of doing this, Bitfinex 1) stabilizes the price of tether at $1 and 2) makes a small arbitrage profit.

This arbitrage profit isn't without risk, of course. Ultimately this system works as long as the downside variance on tether isn't much larger than the upside variance. i.e., if tether goes as high as $1.03, it shouldn't go below $0.97. However, if the market loses confidence in tether broadly then everyone might try to dump their tethers at once and Bitfinex will run out of reserve bitcoin/usd to buy back tether.

Side note: This is exactly what happened to the British treasury when Soros did his famous run. Soros kept selling Pounds on the market and eventually the British treasury ran out of USD to buy the pounds and the price plummeted. The reason he was able to sell so many Pounds is because he was shorting them (borrowing from others and selling back on the market). So Bitfinex is in fact taking on some risk to run this strategy, but as long as Tethers aren't easily shortable, and the market doesn't completely lose confidence, there shouldn't be too big an issue.

All of this is irrelevant if Tether is committing fraud. They could easily be selling Tethers and not holding the Bitcoin they gain in reserve, rather spending it on yachts. If that's happening the price of Tether is bound to fall <$1 and with no one buying them back, the whole thing will crash.

But I don't think the blog presents evidence that this is happening.
Your short tale reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyTf7y3ityk

In sincerity, I found that interesting. Lessons noted!
A lot of effort went into this, I also took a look at the languages I'm familiar with. They even have screenshots of the results and provide an excellent way of showing exactly what you would input and see. I really appreciate the fact that they are pdf that you can save and don't have to rely on an internet connection.
Honestly I don't know the legalities around the actual act of rendition. But even if it's illegal, it's much easier to hide that one flight than it is to hide someone being tortured within the United States. Plus, if someone is in a basement in Queens and they escape, they're in Queens. If someone escapes a basement in the middle of Poland, who cares?
I think most folks make this about Amazon because Amazon is enabling these counterfeit vendors to sell in the US. Amazon has built itself as a 'credible marketplace', and these types of stories are in direct contradiction to the image that Amazon is trying to build.
#7? The list only goes to 5.
Mobile Devices Compromised by Fake Secure Messaging Clients
I'm split on this. If it's <=1hr of work I wouldn't be super upset. I also don't mind whiteboarding as long as it's not just a bunch of banal garbage that google could divulge in a microsecond but unfortunately most interviewers go for the low hanging fruit. At the end of the day, companies aren't going to want to wait a ton of time to complete the interview because they usually want someone yesterday so I doubt that they're going to want to go to a 17 interview series to vet people.
> [...] there’s more people using Firefox, or even more unusual browsers, which can’t use half the web, than there are people using Apple devices.

Highly unlikely.
I am interested in personal experiences/anecdata documenting what happens to these collections when the collector dies. So much effort invested!

I plan to make sure organizational time pays off in the short term, and need to work up a 'site map' for my various digital collections (in the off chance anyone cares after I'm gone). Sharing as much as possible starts to make sense in the long term, so classifying what "must be private" must be done as part of the process. (A tiny bit of this aspect is reflected in how useful my own StackOverflow contributions have been across jobs!)

In this light, tools encouraging sharing useful specific technical info semi-privately within a small group of very close professional friendships start to make a lot of sense.
YouTubers Beg Fans: Leave Videos on in the Background
You’re not in a minority, IMO

You’re just feeling like saying something here and now

I have similar chats with users and tech nerds

Web design is often gonzo for self-aggrandizement

They seem to forget the layout is more a package for content, which is the real reason to be there

Too often it’s turned INTO the content or blended in along with

And it’s terribly distracting

Basically the web is what you get when college kids who are full of righteousness over their own newly acquired standing think they own the place

I’ve whittled my web life to a dozen usual sites, arxiv, phone apps down to email/PD/chat for work and messenging/cal/email/podcasts for personal

I’m not Luddite, I am tired of tech fetishism. Too much redundancy to track for too little new utilitarian value
> That was all under Jobs.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/ wasn't a URL until around 2010. Jobs died in 2011 and back then the page was just a Privacy Policy. Around 2014, they moved their privacy policy page and replaced it with a letter from Tim Cook which puts in writing that they don't monetize user data (if I remember correctly, this was in response to iCloud data breaches). In late 2017 they replaced it again with kind of a product page highlighting privacy.

Since Jobs has passed, they've move away from defaulting to a 4-digit code, encrypted phone backups in the cloud, moved from 2-step to 2-factor id, added a secure co-processor (with touch-id), made numerous moves to disable tracking cookies in their browser. From my observations about Apple, if they don't care about something it stagnates or goes away. All of those requires research, put more onus on the user, or cost Apple more per device.

Trust is a funny thing and I think it's much easier to lose than to gain. So they could move in another direction in the future, but so far it seems like they're continuing with a focus on user privacy.
To play Asteroids. Isn't it obvious?;)
Breaking the back button is not a minor annoyance, it's a major design error. Site size is irrelevant.

Arguably, the rest of the site is also a major design error. Its style over substance approach doesn't look or work like most web sites.

In fact it looks like an excuse to design a set of virtual retro book covers that reference the stylings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I have nothing against vintage book covers, but it seems like an unusual choice for a site about modern web design.
Agreed.

Link to source for the curious/lazy:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/cmd/br...
Philly is economically vibrant and has an affordable housing shortage (although with the number of units currently being built, this might change in a year). The closer you are to jobs, the less affordable. Wages here are depressed compared to other US cities, however.
> A Leuchtterm1917 dotted notebook + mechanical pencil + ink/gel hybrid pen

How well does the pencil write on the Leuchtterm1917? I've definitely noticed that a lot of the notebooks people talk about—those by Rhodia, for instance—are great for using pens, but they don't have enough tooth for pencils to write well. I think I remember feeling the pages of the Leuchtterm in a bookstore and noticing the same smoothness, so I didn't pick one up. Was I mistaken?
In my mind expedited screening is sufficient for everyone. In general, I dislike the idea of creating a privileged class of citizen. Dangling global entry status, or revoking it arbitrarily issue one more way a government can inconvenience or threaten people they dislike.
"You post on 'X' sub. That says all I need to know about you."