skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The largest single difference is that the newer trainsets can take different voltage/current combinations from overhead wires. This is important because different regions in Europe use different electrification systems, regions that can now be reached because of new trainsets.
I thought the Romans had good luck with the 'turtle'? Where they formed a square shield wall with archers inside...
Last time I agreed to Facebooks terms of services it explicitly said that the agreement is between me and Facebook Ireland Limited in Dublin. I only ever consented to the data being transferred and processed in the US.

The Facebook Europeans use is very much an EU company.
The problem is "a few hundred" is an undefined number.

400 would be about 1%, which would be fairly reported as a few hundred. My ceiling number is very high, but I would believe more than 1% are let go.
No, they actually won't. The Data Protection Directive needed to be implemented by national legislators into national law, but the GDPR is a regulation which means it is directly binding law.

Only a few technical, minor points need to be spelled out in national regulations or laws.
I thought they bombed the booster, not the fairing.
I usually use a date as a soft delete. If it's non-null, its deleted, and, you get to record the actual date of deletion.

I've never found it to be a problem. In fact, I find it's more of a problem to physically delete. You just have to design that way from the get go. Not added on after you've realized ppl leave.
There is huge demand for electrical power, but there is only huge desire for clean electrical power. I'm sure Bitcoin miners want to use clean power, but if it means they have tighter margins as a result, then non-clean will be what they stick with. (Bitcoin used only as placeholder here).
A septic tank also costs acreage that city homes do not typically have available for less than $24,000.
Ah. Any group I've been a part of that was larger than 4 people wasn't making real decisions by vote. Instead, a smaller number of folks (1-3) would actually drive the decisions. Sometimes membership of that group rotated, but more often than not it was the same folks, with other occasionally dropping in to offer input, but not driving the decision in any meaningful manner.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I believe that's how things operate--unless lines can be very clearly drawn (which is hard in a startup) a large number of decision makers will lead to no decisions.
How hard would it be to keep the Moon from drifting away?
> The US has software patents.

So does the EU [1].

"The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by courts, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as 'computer implemented inventions'".

[1] https://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html
Amazon to Layoff employees
This article really reminds me of a podcast called The Dollop. One of their first episodes went into the strange world of Competitive Endurance Tickling, and while that and indie wrestling aren't comparable, some of their stories beyond that one really fit the tone of "this interesting subculture you never knew about".
Why do you think social networks have cross country network effects? Xing and VK seem to be doing just fine.
It makes it seem way more terminator/ominous than it is to the average person.

Personally, I think it's actually pretty ominous. Prompting people to consider what the consequences of their FB actions are can't be bad - I bet a lot of people wouldn't tag their friends if they knew what it was doing and really thought about the implications.
I’m satisfied that a significant number of audiophiles have said that they feel the HomePod produces good audio. The numbers seem to back that up.
We just asked you not to post like this, so we've banned the account.
At least you can be pretty sure waaayy more teenagers in that school district are going to read that book now that it's been banned.
Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out and do some work. That's $1000. That's assuming that you don't need a new line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. All the while the guy with the backhoe is looking at your system and wondering how it ever worked or got signed off in the first place.

It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings.

Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get someone out, it's 3x overtime.

You know, I kind of like city water now.
Germany's WWII Duds Get Deadlier
I wrote a longish response to the GP thread precisely so that it doesn't create confusion, but all I am getting is "But it's stupid to say All Lives Matter".

The GP commenter is straight up giving me a privilege check, would anyone actually read what I said?
Don't worry keep HODLing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg
They are required to per the licensing deal they made with the content owner.
yes they handle it. when a customer requests a refund via email, I login to my paddle account, search the invoice, and simply click "refund".
I most certainly do not use my account "primarily for political or ideological battle" so I am very clearly not violating the guidelines.

I answered someone's question with the most accurate and factual answer I could. That you find the answer controversial does not change the fact that I'm acting in good faith.

My personal political beliefs aren't even relevant or expressed in the the reply. I'm stating an opinion based on the facts as I see them. I provided many citations, to a trusted source, which supports my comment.

And the opinion expressed is the same one expressed by most of the world's military experts from all political backgrounds.

You should be warning the users that abused the flagging system to censor my comment. Instead, you're helping the abusive mob by threatening to ban me.

IMHO should unflag my comment, warn those users that flagged it, and apologize to me.
Based on https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24990/did-the-fair... it looks like they didn't get it this time.
Show HN: A budgeting app that helps you start investing
A customer is entitled to an invoice and a full invoice requires an address. Most businesses that offer digital goods and services should have had that even before. All the people I know that were affected by the VAT changes certainly had all customer
adresses.

This is not a cash sale in a local book store.
HIPAA and other mega-regulations like them have the same problems. And they do cause people to just give up rather than deal with the risk. I've listened in on various conversations around health products over the years. HIPAA is a common reason given for not getting into the healthcare space and focusing elsewhere. A lot of smart people and smart products that could have been focused on health just never turn up at all, because of the vagueness, poor drafting and expansive reach of such things.

But this specific thread is about EU social network privacy fines, not US healthcare privacy fines.

The US courts aren't quite the same. They're a lot more independent. The ECJ has a history of surprising things, like hearing cases where one of the appellants wasn't aware he was involved in a court case at all and both sides turned out to be the same law firm, or simply voiding parts of the treaties they found to be inconvenient to the EU, or inventing new 'rights' on the fly (legislating from the bench). Like the right to be forgotten, which was invented by the judges in response to a lawsuit and required massive responses similar to the creation of entirely new regulations.

The Supreme Court is generally much better about following the Constitution, not inventing new laws on the fly and ensuring the cases before them are actually legitimate.
Which is why cities have city water systems, yeah, but anywhere outside of the city, septic and wells just makes more sense.
The passport and security at Gare du Nord in Paris very much looks like that. I don't think eurostar has that much of an edge over airports in term of annoying passengers with queues and pointless rules.
Because if they show you:

Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Pages I like image/text > Friends of Friends image/text > Memes

Then you'll go through a few and then leave the site.

Ads > Friend's image/text > Group image/text > Leave FB

They optimize how much time you spend on FB, so they can show you more ads. Thus, it makes sense to stick the stuff you really care about at the end. To make it hard to find. Because, then instead of coming to the site and getting what you want, you'll spend an hour trying to dig through the crap to find what you want.

More "engagement" is more ads. Nobody at facebook through about whether it makes sense to measure "engagement" alone, or to try and measure some form of "valuable engagement", or "useful engagement".
> Saying that "all lives matter" is genius says a lot about you.

Go somewhere else man, we don't need that on HN.
What?I have unfrozen my account twice.It costs money every time I unfreeze that is about it.
> It's inherently deflationary

I hear this argument a lot from skeptics, and even from some supporters (though the supporters often contest the "Deflation is bad" follow-up).

I think anyone who says "it's inherently deflationary" should translate that to the phrase "it will always go up in value", which is another way of saying the exact same thing.

Even as a Bitcoin supporter, I find the notion that "it will always go up in value" to be a pretty dubious claim to make, much less a more convoluted argument (that admittedly you did not make) that it cannot be successful (i.e. cannot continue to maintain value) because it is deflationary (i.e. must always increase in value), as those two things are saying the opposite thing.

Practically speaking, in the Keynsian view, any examination of the deflationary/inflationary aspect of Bitcoin has to be tied to the fact that there will be way more "Bitcoin" in circulation than Bitcoin on the blockchain, because of the multiplier effects of banking and credit markets (neither of which exist in any interesting way at the moment, but despite what some of the more fervent supporters believe, there's no reason that fractional reserve banking cannot be denominated in Bitcoin). So trying to make an argument about inflation based on M0 is a bit meaningless -- the state of the credit market is way more important than the supply of specie.
Diapers for infants cost ~$1/day. Day care costs literally 100× more.

https://www.amazon.com/HUGGIES-Little-Snugglers-Diapers-Pack...
Hmm. I disagree with that video on several points, mostly because I think it's a bit disingenuous and unfair. If you're going to make comparisons, you have to make them equal (or as close to equal as possible) for them to have any validity.

For one, he makes the point that, for the price, you can get that amp, an Echo Dot, and build the speakers he put together... except that's the entire point. You'd have to build the speakers yourself (including soldering!), have 3 (technically, 4) distinct pieces of equipment to maintain, and you have to have that unsightly hardware and wires everywhere. The setup he shows in the video looks like complete crap to me and there's no way that I would put it out for display like that in my house. The HomePod isn't meant to be an alternative for that. It's meant to compete with other wireless speakers and, when compared against those, it's a significantly better product at a slightly higher price. It's like the "I can build a PC myself that's way better than an iMac for cheaper". Sure you can...but don't pretend like it's the same quality, form factor, ease of setup, or any multitude of reasons why the price differs from a DIY solution. That's not the point here.

The other thing that bothered me is that he tested it in a studio with sound insulation on the walls and then complains about the audio and balance, saying that it's very bass heavy. Again, this isn't what the HomePod was designed for. The mics and the processor are specifically meant to listen for acoustics and reflections and use those to set up the soundstage for the speaker. He's taken all that away and then complains that it's too bass-heavy. Of course it's too bass-heavy! He removed the entire mechanism by which the HomePod determines its output!

Now, I'm sure everyone will be quick to point out that he moved it into his bedroom as if that's a good example of his objectivity. I would agree except that he then doesn't objectively assess the HomePod. He, again, compares it (which he says he set up on his nightstand or table) to his custom-built speakers that are mounted to provide directionality to his sweet spot. He's starting from a non-neutral reference point, comparing to something that the HomePod is not even attempting to be a comparison to, and then pretending to make the objective assessment that it's lacking. Of course it's lacking! It's also lacking when compared to my home theatre setup. That's not really a fair assessment. If he had put an actual Echo on the same nightstand/table and then compared them, I'd find that fair.

Again... I think the HomePod is really just a wireless speaker that is significantly higher quality than what you'd normally get from a wireless speaker at a slightly higher price. As an audiophile, I like it much better than my Echo, my Sonos, or the little Bluetooth speaker that my wife has for obvious reasons. Of course I can build something that sounds better for that amount of money. That's not the point. I'm not going to be able to put together what they did in the package they did for that money without a ton of hassle. That's where the HomePod is worth it to me. YMMV.
Ask HN: Any posts about the seemingly-fractal complexity of writing software?
I've been a software engineer for a fair few years. It has only recently struck me (or begun happening to me?) just how much complexity there is in the work we do.

There was this wonderful piece about the complexity of Javascript in 2016: https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f

It feels like something similar could be written for any of the thousands of areas and sub-areas of our work. And when you're writing something like a container orchestration system and PaaS to go with it, you might have to touch all of them.

Not only that, but I use many dozens of tools and technologies every day, and each has its own idiosyncratic way of randomly breaking. And sometimes when they break, I have to touch a dozen more technologies to fix it. I have to manage all that complexity while keeping all the theoretical stuff straight, and it is often exasperating.

Software engineering feels like a bottomless pit of complexity, but it's hard to capture in words. I recall a post I found from HN by someone working on a feature for an audio app or library, and why it took 100x longer to write than it might have seemed on first glance. Does anyone remember it?

Does anyone have similar stories to share, or even better, know of any pieces that do a good job of communicating this craziness to non-engineers?

Please also feel free to chime in if you think this is nonsense and it's easy to manage all the complexity.

I also want to add: one of the main benefits of working at a place like Google is that the space is tremendously reduced by virtue of there being many fewer technologies you are allowed to touch. It also has the drawback of leaving some skills very underdeveloped. That's probably worth a separate post on its own.
No time to form a turtle formation. Also I think that was only used when storming walls.
This reminds me of the former Romanian dictator's comment that his people simply just did not need color tv. I didn't think I'd ever see that kind of stupidity from the US Congress and regulators. Busting up monopolies is clearly no longer in fashion.
"Niche" might be better.
i don't think so. the author here also helped co-write the "deep learning is alchemy" talk that was somewhat controversial at NIPS.

i think this is especially important if you purely want to do applications. we have a bag of tricks (dropout, batchnorm, different optimizers and learning rate schedules). we have no real theory for why any of this should work; often a proposed explanation will later turn out not to make sense.

so the choice of how to train things comes down to "folklore", the community's collective experience. and there's no guarantee that folklore will generalize to your new architecture or dataset, and no way to know whether it even should.

the presentation seems to have struck a nerve and there's papers and talks floating around now examining the performance of common architectures in very simple settings. it's probably worth paying attention to these at least in the background, as it will hopefully crystallize into a body of knowledge that will be useful for someone trying to decide on architectures and optimization techniques.
> Wait until GDPR is in place in May and German and other EU courts will rule FB to death.

If indeed GDPR will enable those courts to "rule FB to death", and not, as repeatedly promised, be entirely reasonable to comply with, including for Facebook, obviously Facebook will shut down in Europe (and so will a good number of other popular services), and tell their millions of former users why. Here's a quick, free lesson in politics: that will not end well for the GDPR.
Don't worry keep HODLing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2oukQZ6dg
Please do not post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's that based on?

Roosevelt was not a racist, at least not compared to his contemporaries. Booker Washington ate at the executive mansion (a first) with him. He gave African-Americans federal positions they had not previously held and tried to limit some of the lynching going on. He was not always right about this, see his actions in Brownsville, but he was way ahead of others. Wilson, for example, who was an actual racist, but hated war.

He was one of the few people who saw the rising power of the Japanese and respected them. He helped them and the Russians make peace and won a Nobel for that. Never actually went to war as president. He was an unabashed lover of war, but even learned that lesson (too late), when his son died in WW1. It broke him and he ended up dying within a couple years.

He was full of himself, but for someone full of himself, he actually did more for the working class with regulations and anti-trust action then any of the presidents preceding him.

He's guilty of some of what you say, but it's not by any means th full pictures, and ultimately we can only understand people within the context of their time. Roosevelt was way better than most.
This is all stupid if you sell a really small amount of digital goods online. It all starts with 1€ (and less) on a ebook and in comparison: On normal goods there is a threshold of roughly ~100,000€ depending on country sales.
I’m completely unfamiliar with VK, but I’d love to believe that it’s a subtle nod to the Voight-Kampff test.
I'm posting this in the hopes of raising awareness that it wasn't just Axis forces using time delay mechanisms to kill civilians during WW2.

For quite some time I thought that only the Luftwaffe did this, but in fact the RAF also dropped bombs with time delay fuses, intended to kill civilian first responders as well as EODs.
Oh, my mistake :-)
> Big cars and trucks sell immensely well in the US because of the effective subsidization of fuel, as well as anti-competitive behaviour in the light truck sector.

No. Big cars and trucks sell well because we like big cars and trucks. SUVs, Range Rovers, Trucks, even humvees are what americans generally want. Or gas guzzling sports cars. Cars are part of american culture.

> Virtually throughout the entire world, governments put taxes on fuel to address negative externalities caused by fuel consumption.

No. Oil poor countries and regions put taxes on gas/cars in order to push the market towards smaller and more efficient cars that use less gas. We are oil rich and therefore really don't require such interventions.

> As a result, most countries have much higher gas prices than the US, where in some places, is below $2/gallon.

I know. I'm american. I know gas is cheap. But even when gas was expensive ( $4+ ), the top selling vehicles were trucks, SUVs, etc. It's not politically feasible in the US to push people to smaller cars. People will simply vote for politicians who promise lower gas and bigger cars. It's why even elon musk wants tesla to get into SUVs and trucks.

People think that the government supports big vehicles and cheap oil and that's why americans buy big cars and use lot of oil. You have it backwards. We like big cars and cheap oil and that's why the government supports big cars and cheap oil.
Hmm, also in Seattle and seem to recall a record long summer last year with 100+ days of no rain (well, one which just managed to trip it by volume at SEATAC in the middle).

Personally, I think the whole 'Seattle has horrible' weather is pretty overblown. It's grey for a couple of months.

I'm writing this now, in February, to a perfectly blue sky. It is cold, but not grey in the least.

I've personally found it more challenging that folks don't seem to socialize much. They just work non-stop throughout the week, then perhaps do something on the weekend. It contrasts quite a lot to when I was in New Zealand where you frequently see your friends after work.
Still, "more money more votes" is different from "centralized". No matter how many USD I have, I cannot make direct changes to Federal Reserve policy.
> again, in 99.99% of the cases, we aren't doing the markup.

I find that hard to believe. That's the retailer markup? So you're just relying on the 0.01% (I know, arbitrary) where you do, and the opt-out $10 Service Charge to make money?
Not to mention the shady fees. The last time I used instacart, there was a box checked called “service fee”, I clicked on it to see what it was and it said “this $10 charge is optional and helps us keep running instacart”. Meanwhile the tip for your driver box is not checked. I bet a large number of people assume the service fee is the tip, and leave tip blank. Blatant tip stealing.

To be fair, Amazon Prime also does this.
The internal structure of an atom is vastly different from the impression that most science books give you with their illustrations to the point that the question of us being able to clearly seeing an atom is almost nonsensical/doesn't make sense.

Atoms are much more nebulous than the concept of small indivisible balls of matter.
Left, right, and center... of what? Like what is it oriented to?
Stores that offer $5 credit usually don't sell things that cost $5. So it is nothing but a $5 discount code really.

If they are really giving away credit for free that can be used wholly then they probably need to verify your identity e.g. a $0 credit card authorisation or something.
I think it's reasonable to ask if it can actually be achieved.

Tooling and die costs, re-training of employees, mothballing of old plants, re-architecting of most of their car designs without sacrificing safety or fuel economy, plus the sheer amount of manufacturing of battery capacity you are asking to come online, are just a few of the costs and engineering issues that spring to mind.

Remember, Canada was going to implement the Kyoto Protocol - up until they realized it would be a 10% hit to Canada's GDP. Then they "re-considered": http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-pulls-out-of-kyoto-pr...
I don't think that is completely true... if you are using lenses to magnify, you aren't doing the same thing as expanding 1 pixel to 500x500. The light 'resolution' is already present, you are just spreading it out so you can see each bit more clearly.