skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similar situation. Got on the waiting list as soon as they put it up. Got my "Google Fiber" T-shirt. And then nothing, for several years.

When Comcast offered 1000Mbps* service for $70/mo with a three year contract, I gave up. Interestingly, this offer only seems to have been available in likely GF service areas and was a pretty transparent attempt to tie up potential GF customers with a nice early termination fee.

* download. Upload is 40Mbps.
Cutting a couple of wires would be my first mod on that car...
Without reading the article, this is exactly why I gave up on my last side-project.

The subscription box business is great for consumers, but nearly indefensible against competitors.

Dollar shave club was hugely successful because it was a first-mover. Now Gillette and others are offering direct subscription services.

There simply is no moat if you don't own the base materials in the package and can control for manufacturing costs.
While observing this run-up in income inequality and the unwillingness of the rich to do anything about it, I’ve concluded that we haven’t really learned anything and are going to have a French Revolution or Russian Revolution style “shoot them in the streets” event.
Why do you assume that without wealth concentration there would be no mobile phones?
That's fair.
I didn't realise it was not available everywhere, it's one of those things I keep thinking are in coreutils until it's not there on an OS (funny enough, I keep thinking half the commands I use are like that ... until it breaks)
Just finished listening to the first one. Pretty good. Not too long, not too short with good description of how the hack works. Instead of just talking by yourself or with a guest, you made it into some sort of public radio story and aded sound effects to your stories. Thanks for sharing.
Xiaomi smartphones may hit the US in late 2018 or early 2019
I love the irony of there being several ads on that page.
> If you can't stream Netflix when it's raining heavily outside, that's a big problem.

It's the same problem satellite TV customers have dealt with for years.
I am an extremely lonely person, to the point where I'm suicidal, and I can't say I can pinpoint the cause, only that it's psychological(duh!). I can't equate my extreme introvertism with the rise of technology, in fact I believe that without the rise of technology I'd probably have already killed myself. This way I've managed to get a job despite my social and emotional inpetitude and felt at least a small part of belonging, that I'm at least somewhat "normal", not that it helped much. I don't think when it comes to depression and loneliness that anything has changed when it comes to people, but instead the internet has provided a place where we can write self-loathing walls of which has brought this ever-present issue to the worlds attention, which is in line with the article's message.
I see the author didn't know about another Python-subset-in-Python, https://github.com/darius/tailbiter -- I should've promoted it a little more, and maybe it'd have been helpful.
We seem convinced that pushing people to go out in the world, settle into family life, and such is what we should be shooting for.

But a lot of this comes from traditional values/plant boundaries for acceptable social patterns.

Perhaps we really need more alone time and less forced "sell yourself to survive."

Human societies seem to be full of stretches of coming together, then short, traumatic periods of divisiveness, that end with new norms. We seem to be in something like that now.

There's literally no where else to go. We'll still tacitly be around one another. I can't help but think though, that our culture is pushing "socialize at X level" because of the modern wins: it enforces adherence to popular meme. It's like religion and missionary work; socialize a lot, get in someone's face with your ideas, always be peddling it.

What if it's not a literal loneliness we need, but ideological? To reclaim our imaginations. Power up an ability to imagine and think for ourselves, that's yanked away by Slack dings, and hitting next quarters metrics.

We over socialized. Is it a dramatic pullback and loss of shared community?

Hardly. That may be what you feel, but outside your feelings, I don't see it. Honestly, I'm all about not having to be in people's faces or here them as much as I do.
Not quite. The meals I prepare from Blue Apron are significantly healthier than most takeout options - we control the sodium entirely and the majority of the ingredients are fresh vegetables and proteins. Plus the variety week to week is staggering - I've been getting weekly Blue Apron for more than a year and never had a repeated recipe. I've learned about all sorts of new foods I had never even heard of before. I am absolutely too lazy to meal plan and go grocery shopping, but ordering takeout isn't even a comparison point for me.
It has always seemed like Malthus simply made the mistake that a logistic function looks a lot like an exponential function early on during a transition to a new equilibrium.

Maybe he was saying that a decrease in fertility had to be an explicit goal, without realizing that decreases in fertility could be a side effect of other social developments.
There's no way even $10m fortunes are squandered at near that rate. Money has decreasing marginal utility so even though the amount diminishes, the utility granted by it decreases much slower.
It is. Get off of it. Ask cashiers how they are doing before they talk to you. Smile at strangers. Make small talk when standing around. Eventually you will find someone who is not indoctrinated into these isolation chambers tossed at us by corporations profiting off of our attention. When you do find someone on the same wavelength (perhaps it might be me!) you can enjoy, even if briefly, a real human interaction - eye contact, smiling, and general positivity in this increasingly more digitized, isolated world.

Write letters to your loved ones. Ask friends out to get coffee or dinner to talk about life.

The world needs more ludd-lights (my term for luddites, but not so extreme) now more than ever.
Ask HN: Reverse engineer NLP/machine reading job application text engines?
Did you dig the Bermuda grass out of the ground? Physically removing every blade, runner and root nodule it is the only way I know of to get rid of it.
> since they're internet based, they aren't vulnerable to SS7 exploits.

I think the problem with SS7 is that there's no authentication between providers. At least as far as I know.
Problem there is that once people learn to cook, they have no need for the service anymore. To survive you'd need to have a healthy pipeline of new customers with manageable acquisitions costs relative to the lifetime value of the customer.

And even if Blue Apron could clear all of those hurdles profitably, as the article contends, they have no moat. They are not vertically integrated so there's but only so much efficiency they can glean out of the supply chain and there are much bigger fish out there that can bludgeon them to death with scale.
An interesting titbit:

>In 2017, Canadian scientists recreated an extinct horse pox virus to demonstrate that the smallpox virus can be recreated in a small lab at a cost of about $100,000, by a team of scientists without specialist knowledge. This makes the retention controversy moot since the virus can be easily recreated even if all samples are destroyed. //
Spending inherited money is not the same as squandering it, and of course this does not occur in every case. More to the point, however, the objection to the estate tax does not depend on how the inheritance is used. The owners of the estate desired to give it to their inheritors, not the government. As the owners, and thus the ones who either earned the property or received it as a gift from others, the final disposition of their property is properly their decision to make.
Or, possible have a white label option in place from day one. Would an easy franchise/affiliate/brand-able option result in less copycats and more sales partners?
GPA? Zero impact. Building things aside played a huge role though. It's the main reason why I'm where I'm at today. I'd say aim for average score, spend your extra hours building things aside. Your real GPA is the positive impact you have on people.
Do you recommend this book? Is this a core theme of the novel? I've never heard of it, but I'd love to read about thoughts on social isolation caused from modernism that are 101 years old!
I'm not against this idea, but an inattentive 23 year old driver who failed to yield killed a bicyclist crossing an interstate on ramp (in the crosswalk) down the street from my house last week, so there is risk involved.

Riding bicycles alone isn't going to help; its going to take decades of urban planning to fix the last 60 years of mistakes.
> Ok, sure, yeah, I guess I can agree that if a false accusation actually happens, all sides' stories should be heard.

You misread what I wrote. My point was when it is proven that a false rape accusation is made, people turn the focus to how the proven false rape accusation hurt other women, not how it hurt the man who was falsely accused.

People say that false rape accusations are bad because it makes it harder for actual rape victims to be believe. What people should be saying is false rape accusations are bad because it hurts the falsely accused.

> Weird as it is for you to bring it up that way.

No. It's weird you misinterpreted a fairly straightforward point I was making.

> But female dominated positions aren't "diversified" because it's one of the few places where a woman actually gets a shot at a job.

One of the few places? This is hilarious. You are doing exactly what I said. You are spinning discrimination against men into victimization of women.

> I'm a male and it's easy for me to see what toxic masculinity looks like.

I'm sure you are.

> Misogyny, homophobia, violence, and other forms of oppression are all traits men overwhelmingly exhibit more than women.

That sounds very sexist. What's the difference between you and sexists decades ago saying women's "toxic femininity" needed to be "cured" with hysterectomies?

> If women acted like this we would label it and talk about it

There are just as many misogynous, homophobic, violent and "other forms of oppression" women out there.

It's so funny. I bet you are the first one to talk about how there are no differences between men and women right? We are pretty much the same. Right? And yet you claim that men are "toxic".
A New Political Movement
I am often left wondering why people seem so concerned about income inequality, and when asking those who are concerned sadly the response tends to be indignant. With that said I was quite interested that your linked article might explain why inequality should be a concern from an economic standpoint. Unfortunately, the "savings glut" argument is quite week.

To summarize, a "savings glut", they claim, is what happens when wealthy people do not spend their money, causing an increase in bank deposits, causing a drop in interest rates, causing the central bank to have less leverage in managing the economy. While in a sans-central bank economy interest rates may work that way, the world's economies are managed by central banks who, more or less, determine what the interest rates will be. That is to say, current record-low interest rates have very little to do with savings from the wealthy, and are mostly tied to the tens of trillions of dollars injected into the economy in recent years by the central banks.
31M process instances in Flowable 6.3: a benchmark
On the cli side, you can also browse/explore dat content with https://github.com/millette/dat-shell
Having been involved in some systems that make heavy use of actors I 100% agree. We call actors "concurrent gotos" as they bring all the "advantages" of gotos with the added "benefit" of concurrency. It's a very primitive model of concurrency, only slightly better than mutexes. There are much better models in the research community but few of the ideas have yet made it into usable systems.
> Every time I take photos of clouds or water, it always looks dull.

If your image is well-lit, in focus and doesn't have motion blur, you are probably just missing post-processing. Most pictures will look rather dull until they are touched-up to make them 'pop' - you can have a look at the before and after images from this Google AI research project[1] that processes landscape photos to make them more pleasing to the eye.

Playing around with brightness, contrast, saturation and color curves can greatly improve a photo.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15973712/google-ai-resear...
Great article! I've been thinking about this on and off recently, as I wonder if we might be having intuitive issues when it comes to gradient descent optimization.

3 Blue,1 Brown had a video recently that kicked off my head scratching and is a great complement to your article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwAD6dRSVyI
By being able to influence legislators.
Are these courses being taught by graduate students? The three main instructors seem like they are students themselves, with an army of under and grad TAs.

Pity that you pay so much money to attend Stanford only to be taught by your peers. Not knocking on Stanford as this is how is being done much everywhere in the undergrad level now.
This is a very upper-middle class view of the economy because it very much represents the difference between most people and upper middle class - those in the upper middle class tend to be employees of successful tech or medical companies, and that makes sense since most people here fall into that category.

However looking at the data there is another section of the economy where the 1% and .1% reside, i.e those who own mid to large size companies or are high up exectives. In that section you'll see owners of companies like Walmart, Target, really any successful company. Doesn't have to be tech or medicine. The point being those sectors of the economy have been hit the worst by de-unionization because they aren't necessarily booming (even if they earn a profit) so without a union employees have very little bargaining power.

If you want to really reduce inequality you have to compress those sectors of the economy by leveling the field between employees and business owners.
Nice try Alex.
No it doesn’t. Makefiles define inputs, outputs and the commands that transform input to output. Make then compares the last modified timestamp of inputs with outputs on each run and reruns the commands for the targets that are out of date.

Make is in no way limited to C or C++ projects and there is absolutely nothing wrong in using Make for a JavaScript project.

The only thing that sucks a bit is maintaining the list of inputs and outputs if you have a lot of files.

Well, that and the fact that Makefiles are not generally portable between GNU and BSD Make so if you use both Linux and a BSD you need to install either gmake on BSD or bmake on Linux and then remember to invoke that rather than just make for your project. Of course you could have a bash function that will look and pick GNU make if there is a GNUmakefile in your directory and BSD make if there is a BSDmakefile, but maintaining such things is a hassle as well.

It always comes down to picking the right tool and sometimes Make will be it and sometimes it won’t but whether the output is JavaScript or a PDF (e.g. from LaTeX documents) or JPEGs or whatever has very little to do with it.
Instead of logging data, I'd suggest debugging for root causes. Regardless of approach, items:

Hydration. Eye-strain. Sleep. Exercise. Stress. Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migraine#Cause

Meta: we seem obsessed about data and we have standard techniques for exploring relationships between them, but what is the equivalent source of techniques for first-principle root-cause search? (In the more practical, not the philosophical* sense)

* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/
7 Life-Changing Perspectives to Overcome Your Family’s Obsession with Stuff
Hey, Switzerland is worse! McDonalds will easily set you back 12 CHF last time I checked a few years ago, it could be worse now. Grocery shopping was kind of nerve racking, even at discount Migros.
Replying to andrepd's comment to your comment:
The incredible amount of Work, Capital Outlay, Engineering, etc.etc.etc. that is required to create mobile phones is a huge barrier to any group of people doing so. Therefore, they are incentivized to generate a profit on each phone they eventually produce/sell. If the phones are popular enough, then they may make quite a lot of money. Like jesus dude, nobody forces anyone to buy a phone - everybody is doing it of their own volition and that's why mobile phone developers get rich.
This was the first application of the Monte Carlo numerical method I've done in college. Take an N-dimensional cube with volume = 1. Inscribe an N-sphere in it. Calculate the volume of the N-sphere as a function of N.

I was too lazy to do the strict proof, so I sprayed it with lots of Monte Carlo bullets. It's like a page of code in any language. It turns out, as the article says, the volume of the N-sphere keeps getting smaller and smaller as N increases. In higher dimensions, there's a lot more volume in the corners of the N-cube. It did seem like the N-sphere was shrinking down to nothing in spaces with lots of dimensions.

Seems obvious after you read the article and look at the diagrams, but back then I had to think about it for a while. I thought my implementation was wrong somehow, but eventually I realized what was going on. Pretty amazing stuff.
Just today on numberphile channel they showed how to pass circle through smaller square hole by bending it in higher (3rd) dimension: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AvFNCNOyZeE
Lots of good advice here. Here are a few more basic tips:

1. Read it out loud when you're done. If it doesn't sound right, change it so that it does.

2. For the love of everything grammatical, please learn how to use apostrophes properly. Especially its/it's, your/you're, and yours. "It's" always means "it is." "You're" always means "you are." "Your's" is not a word.

3. There is no shame in using a spellchecker. (There is often shame in not.)

4. Know your audience. Don't use technical terms if you're writing for non-technical users and don't dumb it down for a technical audience.

5. Be concise. There's no need to prove you can use a dictionary or thesaurus to stretch out a sentence or to try to sound more intelligent than you need to be (it doesn't work anyway).

If you want a friendlier guide to grammar than some of the other books listed in this thread (which you should also consider adding to your reference library), check out Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Girls-Quick-Better-Writing/dp...
Unfortunately for Blue Apron that's not going to make them money. Once you learn the basic skills you won't need them anymore. They'll have a hard time growing if this is their model. gambiting's reply illustrates this perfectly
I don't think that's true. Ericsson used it at one point. What makes you think every single train in the "Western world" uses it as well?
From memory, India didn't allow any kind of encryption on GSM calls/texts. Is this still true?
I agree with you. Not only that, but society progresses precisely because not all crime can be caught. Ask any interracial couple a century ago, or any gay person fifty years ago, or any marijuana smoker last year. These are all things that would never have become legal if every single person who practiced them was caught right away.
Measuring absolute outcomes ("lifestyle") instead of relative ones like inequality may seem more objective. But you'll find that the ultimate outcome, life satisfaction, is tied more to the latter than the former.

Case in point: Your lifestyle almost certainly has a higher value than any of the British monarchs except Queen Elisabeth II.

If you look at Maslow's Pyramid of Needs, it has "self-actualization" at the very top. Achieving that level requires more than just a comfortable life. You need a degree of power over your own life that many even in the middle class don't have. One small example that may resonate in this community may be the freedom to try your hand at a startup, and how such plans can be stymied just by the problem of giving up employer-sponsored health insurance.
Just one example is public beach access. All over the us, many wealthy people buy up large beachfront mansion properties (but not the public beach nearby). But somehow there ends up being lawsuits because construction (and sometimes private guards) will close off what was previously publically accessible beach areas. It's a symbolic version of what is happening for the wealthy in many other areas - in particular the political process where dollars speak in decisions stronger than voters.
Le Maire told the JDD that they should expect to be taxed between 2 percent and 6 percent of their revenue. He also added that the final figure will be closer to 2 percent than to 6 percent.

So 2% must then be a significant increase over the current effective tax rate? Or is this just some politicians posturing for votes?
Well, it's a separate product that Facebook acquired. True or not, it's a common perception that Facebook abandoned Cassandra.

https://www.wired.com/2014/08/datastax/
The reason you can't do that is to protect the system from abuse. Kickstarter already has a bunch of scammers, but it's not as bad because people are spending disposable income on it and not using it as an investment. As soon as you let the average Joe speculate on start-ups, thousands of companies will pop up trying to figure out the best way to scam people.
Just a sidenote from the other side of the world: Brazil has been offering free HPV vaccines for girls under 15 for a while and since last year to all boys at 12; they plane to have it available to both sexes between 9 and 15 in the next couple of years. It is estimated that nearly half of young people (16-25 years of age) have some form of the HPV in the country. I don't have any results numbers to share or source from now, however, my apologies. Let's hope Australia is not the only country to do that though!
Betteridge's law of headlines holds again.
I know one Japanese guy who strongly prefers eating mostly rice. Surely it's not a status thing any more. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a non-cultural cause for this.
GP might have an extremely low bar for "restaurant meal." $9 isn't quite enough for an okay lunch sandwich in the coastal/metropolitan US. Some sort of entree is more likely at about $18.
Taxing on revenue rather than profit feels wrong. If you run a loss you're still on the hook for taxes? That doesn't make sense to me.

How far can the EU push before these companies decide it is not worth having actual businesses there?
History has many examples, but outside of the illegal (see SV salary collusion case), there are many head games that are played. A common tactic is to make the employee feel insecure. For example, say that you're looking at efficiency improvements and considering going overseas to tamp down any chances people expect a raise. Get employees to feel guilty for not working harder, etc, etc...
A business's profit is the excess value created by workers. Low-skill workers don't get the true value of their labor because they have no negotiating leverage in many cases (especially with the downturn in union strength in the US). It's not a symmetric negotiation, as it's easy for the big and powerful company to find other employees, because in many cases the workers' only alternative to being underpaid is being unemployed and homeless. Business owners exploit the basic human need for food and shelter to underpay low-skill workers.