skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how the $$ Google might pay to Oracle compares to the $$ it is spending to move away from Java by building replacements (v8, Go, Dart, Flutter/Fuschia, etc.) that are all essentially "GC languages with a great runtime VM".

E.g. I can understand Oracle/Sun needing some amount of money for stewarding Java, as the teams required to build/maintain/QA/release the JVM were AFAIU in the hundreds, so not cheap. But "Java is free", so they didn't have a way for covering that cost from the majority of enterprise developers who were getting a free lunch, and instead relied on the J2ME licensing almost by accident/happenstance IMO.

So now, companies like Google are not "paying for hundreds of Oracle/Sun engineers to develop a platform/language/ecosystem", but instead "paying hundreds of internal engineers to develop (multiple) platforms/languages/ecosystems".

Which they can do, and still provide v8/Go/Dart/etc. "for free" because they have the luxury of paying for everything with ads, which Oracle/Sun didn't, which forced Oracle/Sun to commit the sin of asking for money.

Granted, don't want to be an Oracle/Sun apologist b/c they messed up in a lot of ways (stagnated the language/etc., don't have a great reputation, etc.) and the competition/iteration of the next-gen languages like Kotlin/TypeScript/Go/etc. is working out great.

Just interesting to think of the economic trade-off, e.g. if Oracle had been a little less controlling, and Google a little more willing to pay licensing/something, if the net effect would have been Java today being in a demonstrably stronger market position than it is.

And, either way, the rest of us are still being spoiled by so many free lunches: amazing tech (languages/libraries/frameworks/ecosystems) built by professional teams that we don't pay a dime for.
You mean American corporations. American users aren't Facebook's customers.

All users are just product to Facebook.

It could well be that Facebook's American corporate customers are more interested in worldwide product than domestic product.
This makes all the more sense as the journalist explicitly considers New York, or at least a city with extensive and reliable public transport option, where I would expect Uber to be profitable.

There certainly are places where Uber subsidies rides by half, but those are generally new territories or places where they have closer competitors.
Had to use WebEx on a client call once. Had to install two different packages because audio was "provided by Comcast". It was the only time ever that I saw the video, but couldn't get audio, so a coworker had to update me on Slack in real time so I knew what I was watching. Horrible.
[Remote] jquery, react, ES6, Redux, RoR opportunities
Can't speak to this specific project, but your cynicism isn't really misplaced overall. You forgot to mention that the cool project is used as leverage to lower salary expectations...
In this field "having a case" depends not so much on objective truth but on subjective narrative, having enough money to pay more lawyers for a longer time than the opponent, finding the right judge, making sure the jury is stuffed according to plan and more of such skullduggery. If it were about objective facts the case would have been over and done with in a month with a definite conclusion, either it being OK to use API's without licensing or it being a violation to do so. If the outcome were the latter there would have been some bickering over how much to pay for said violation, add another month for that.

Alas, this is not about objective truth and "having a case". It is the result of a free but regulated market being infected by a parasitic organism which has turned the regulator's defence mechanisms to its own purpose, the which being the extraction of as much value as feasible while keeping the host alive.
How is the title click-bait? It doesn't say that Google will pay billions. It says it is a billion-dollar case...and it is (at least potentially).

If this meets your definition of "very clickbaity" then where could you go to avoid click-bait?!
Hi forcer, when you drag it over the 'drop zone' does the little zip image/icon disappear?
> Perhaps the best reason to be skeptical of RISUG and Vasalgel from a scientific standpoint rests on a cultural factor: guys generally don't want to talk about their balls with doctors.

Uh... If HN had polls, I bet it would look like this:

Would you be willing to talk to your doctor about getting a safe, reversible 15 minute injection into your testicles to prevent unwanted pregnancies?

Yes: ========================== 99%
No: 0%
I don't know: 1%
> I'm intrigued by this. Do you genuinely think that the GIMP developers don't want or don't try to make it usable or to improve it as much as they can

Yes. They focus on features _they_ care about, not what users care about. The features announced in this release are good proof of that, but if you look in a comment below there's a first-hand experience of how GIMP's developers are annoyed by usability and the fact that users would want a more usable software.

I far from think that GIMP's developers owe me or anyone else anything. I just think it's a shame that GIMP is recommended so often to people that just moved to Linux (or actually in general), because there are good programs--like Pinta for editing and Krita for drawing--that are at par with Photoshop and are totally usable without installing Photoshop or going back to Windows.
I am waiting till someone builds a taxi app that would work exactly as IRC servers worked 20 years ago and Uber dies in it's own monocultural misery. Now that's capitalism.
>Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention”

Quite a difference.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been thinking about writing a guide on deploying Firebase apps to production, I can include it there.
Wouldn’t Kotlin be the more logical route?
Waymo partners with Jaguar for premium vehicle
Local community? No.

I have spent many hours helping people on /r/learnprogramming and in person throughout the past few years. I know it's not really giving back to those who need it most, but I think it has a net positive effect on the world if that's your thing. Me I just do it because teaching is pretty fun. I got started doing that kind of stuff while being a TA the majority of my undergrad. I would probably do this kind of stuff full time if not for money...
As one of the people who you probably think doesn't understand the sense of community that a church can provide, I am curious if you think church can provide a sense of community that can't be provided by a bowling league, book club, or any other local gathering of people.

I have nothing against people gathering to find a sense of community but I am somewhat against the beliefs of most organized religions that I am familiar with.
I really hope this is not the case.

Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem.

If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best.

Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there.

We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.
Every woman I've ever been with has already been on BC, this is the same for all my guy friends. It's never something I've ever had to consider.

I think the article doesn't bother separating real motivations from stated motivations.

People want to have sex without consequences. That happens either in committed relationships or hookups. This gel does nothing for people who just want to hookup because of the risk of STDs. So you still have to use a condom anyway so why get the gel injection?

In committed relationships I could see it working. But committed relationships don't just spring up from nowhere. People who become committed probably started out doing this thing called dating where they tried to meet and sleep with people before settling down.

So women will use BC in both phases because it's the path of least resistance. I could see this working best as an alternative to vasectomy for a couple that is done having kids. But not as a replacement for condoms or female hormonal BC.
Why are we still calling Uber and it’s ilk “ridesharing”?

The word implies sharing a ride but the driver is there to drive, they don’t get out at the destination.
This looks neat. I’ll take a look, thanks!
How to review papers about generic improvements to GANs by Ian Goodfellow
> cheap and featureful devices with no locked bootloaders

would you mind providing links to such devices, and the roms that go on them? I'd be very interested in this when my Moto Z eventually dies
Warning: this article contains an auto-playing video of the incident.
I haven’t been to Paris lately but my friends there describe it that way: Uber drivers there now need some hard-to-get and I believe limited license, so the drivers there are a lot less abundant, prices are higher and wait time longer.

I wouldn’t be surprised if city hall economists publish some impact study on drivers’ revenue, or on congestions: both are hot topics there.
People constantly cite self-driving cars as Uber's salvation, but never really seem to think through the implication. Hypothetically, let's say that self-driving cars are invented next year. Necessarily, these will start in high-end vehicles (as nearly all new car features do) before getting rolled out to the broader ecosystem. Now if you're Uber you face one of two choices:

1) You enter into perhaps the most capital-intensive business of all time and buy a fleet of these new self-driving cars. This would be a humongous cash raise; NYC alone would likely need $1B in vehicles to match current coverage levels. You'd also need service and maintenance facilities (or pay for someone else to handle it)

2) You wait for enough of these vehicles to be bought by consumers to create a ride share network akin to the current one, except without the drivers

Option 1 is likely a non-starter. Uber-style businesses are popular with investors precisely because they avoid this business model. Buying the vehicles and facilities to maintain current US coverage would probably run $100B or more. That's not really feasible.

Option 2 saves Uber from that awful capital raise, but means they're waiting for self-driving cars to reach high enough saturation within the broader vehicle fleet that they can use as rideshares during owners idle periods. Based on what Google suggests for a typical car upgrade cycle, this would be 5 years or more. It also probably doesn't improve their margins enormously, because they're still licensing the car from an owner who will demand a cut of fares (whether it be directly or as an hourly lease fee). The assumption is that fee is materially lower than what drivers want for their car and time, but there's no reason to believe that's true (especially given, as many studies have suggested, drivers in most markets currently lose money on a per-mile basis). During the initial period of self-driving adoption, owners fees will be higher, as there are fewer of these vehicles available and owners will have better bargaining power via their scarcity.

But while Uber waits for adoption in scenario 2, their first-mover advantage in rideshare erodes. If you're GM or Mercedes, this looks like a pretty high-margin business, and it looks really tempting to use the self-driving tech you're already putting into these vehicles to spin-up a competitor, and right now there's nothing on the books saying you can't simply lock Uber out of it.

Long-term, that's my expectation: that self-driving cars will exist and Uber will die to competition from OEMs (or some kind of alliance between OEMs and Waymo).

[e]fixed some formatting.
I think the part that gets lost in all of this is that Sun offered to license Java to Google previously for $100M. [1] Google turned that down and bypassed Sun because they didn't want to pay (or license). At the time, Sun was happy to see Java being used by Google, even without the license. Still, Google knew exactly what they were doing. [2] My point is, they did this to themselves and they knew what they were possibly getting into.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2509401/technology-law...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/why-oracle-not-sun-sued-google-ove...

EDIT: Added the second reference and cleaned up thoughts. Included note regarded license as well as pay.
This is what I was hoping to see when I clicked on the comments thread. If you can find a valuable use for the waste, then you can make it profitable (or at least less expensive) for the farmers to keep the sewage out of the water table.

One man's disgusting pig shit is another man's profitable pig shit.
Very good article, doesn't go far enough - monero is not anonymous at all. It misses the biggest issue - that analyzing agencies can spam transactions, generating thousands of inputs daily. A big fraction of other transactions is transparent (shapeshift or other exchanges) to state agencies anyway. As monero has almost no use, cross-chain mixing with bitcoin/ethereum is way, way more anonymous than monero, and in addition can be done in a way that maintains plausible deniability.

Monero is the worst instance of false security in crypto. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, monero users are impervious to these facts, so darknet busts with ridiculous parallel construction narratives aren't going to stop anytime soon. It's not like fbi is ever going to publicly say that monero isn't anonymous to them.
> but the restaurants aren't getting the short end of the stick here - the drivers are.

Exactly. Drivers are getting the short end of the stick. Restaurants are affected but given the exposure they get, it might be worth it.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Cookies
> So a news organization can be a part-time propagandist then?

Of course.

> In other words they are only producing propaganda when the story contain unflattering details about a subject?

No. They can be producing propaganda when they are pushing a flattering narrative as well. Like what foxnews does with trump.

And it isn't just bloomberg. It's much of the media. As I said, there hasn't been a day without some propaganda about FB the past year. If you doubt it, do as I suggested. Go spend some time on the waybackmachine.
Let's see, I just upgraded to Android Studio 3.1, opened one of my previous ridiculously simple apps, and voila:

Could not find com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1.
Searched in the following locations:
https://jcenter.bintray.com/com/android/tools/build/gradle/3.0.1/gradle-3.0.1.pom
https://jcenter.bintray.com/com/android/tools/build/gradle/3.0.1/gradle-3.0.1.jar
Required by:
project :
Add Google Maven repository and sync project
Open File

Okay, I hit the "Add Google Maven repository and sync project", and now we have:

Could not GET 'https://jcenter.bintray.com/org/ow2/asm/asm/5.1/asm-5.1.pom'. Received status code 502 from server: Bad Gateway
Enable Gradle 'offline mode' and sync project

I don't know what the hell any of this means -- I'm not a Java/Gradle/etc. person at all, just forced to use this pile of mess for Android -- so I cluelessly hit "Enable Gradle 'offline mode' and sync project" hoping it will resolve the error, and now:

No cached version of org.ow2.asm:asm:5.1 available for offline mode.
Disable Gradle 'offline mode' and sync project

Created a new project and it compiled successfully. Cut-and-paste classes, here we come!

On another note, creating a blank Android app results in nothing short of 87 files. Does it really have to be this complicated? Do we really have to use this gradle nonsense? (90%+ of the errors I get hen upgrading Android Studio say something about gradle). Most frameworks on other platforms are simple and elegant enough that it is possible to memorize the minimal "hello world" example and implement it with vim, and the IDE is just there for convenience, not out of necessity.
If you want to be really cynical then the project they’re moved to is still fusion, but the NIF style used for nuclear weapons research rather than power plants. Then it’s not just about salary, it’s about tempting people who would never work on weapons research into that space.
Dictator. The dictation fixing tool
Either we aren't reading the same article or I'm misunderstanding it.

It starts off with the anecdote of having discovered the key parts of making the birth control pill possible, 30 years before it became available, as a preface to the rest of the article:

Where it's been 30+ years since the gel (now marketed as vasalgel) was invented in India.

I didn't find it misleading at all, but maybe I missed something?
Help Wanted: Netflix Movie Publicist. $400,000 Including Options
Why? I'm sure it's fun for you, but it's terribly unprofessional for the lawyers to use that setup.
It / this article / this issue really isn't about the consumer; they'll pick whichever option is cheapest. It's about sustainable employment. Are you comfortable paying, I dunno, $5 for a ride that would normally cost $15, knowing your driver has been working for 16 hours and still hasn't earned enough today to pay rent or pay for fuel?

One could make the argument / defense that the driver chose to, nobody made him, and that he has nothing else though. In which case anything is better than nothing. Both are IMO regulatory problems, which a government should do something about.
IMO, isn't "The Gig Economy" the new term for "Temp Jobs" instead?
They aren't diodes either
“It's hard to find a good lamp” – Donald Judd (1993)
Cab companies have been raising fares for a long time without losing much business. Bus companies, too. Yes, a 30% or larger price increase vs. the competition will cost you a lot of business. But existing transit providers get away with smaller increases with impunity.

If Uber is 10% away from breakeven, it can probably close that gap in stages without ruinous consequences from demand elasticity.
Or to ads on your body.
that would've been pretty cool. they had that kind of capital back then, right?
The Future of JavaScript Frameworks Looks Very Fast
Teaching Kids to Code
Given the number of people they included in that experiment, there's a good chance they did actually drive some of them to suicide. Facebook probably even knows who, but I doubt they'll ever share that data and rat themselves out.

When you're already on the edge, an algorithm feeding you negativity would probably be enough to push you over.
100% agree. It's become so commonplace to stereotype southerners in a particular way in the media and by Hollywood. I live in NYC now and have to deal with constant judgement whenever I mention I'm from Alabama. The most ironic thing is that it's typically from the "tolerant" left.
I bought Affinity Designer when I was still on Mac, and it was the first affordable non-Adobe app that I used that could open up Illustrator files without mangling them.

When I eventually switched to Windows, I basically ended up repurchasing Designer and Photo. Their software is great for the price.
Thanks for making this point. People who would never even consider mocking the speech patterns of immigrants will fall all over themselves to denigrate southerners, thier speech and deplorable, to some, religious beliefs.
But isn't it at least a little bit curious that any and everyone trying to implement it did an equally terrible job?
BC has side-effects, so currently the burden is placed on women. It's the path of least resistance simply because it is the status quo, but that's no argument for why it should continue that way.
What I found particularly worrying that the Facebook SDK potentially can use the permissions of an embedding app to do its own thing.
That licence would have more restrictions in both the short and long term than just the upfront cost.
Sounds like you are cutting corners on redundancy. Saves $$$, but risky.
So what happens when the hard drive fails and you lose all the data and configuration on the box?
I don’t think this is given - e.g., in NYC, Chicago, and SF, most cabs are driven by poor immigrants[1] and most rent (in economic terms) is extracted by medallion owners.

[1] Nothing wrong with being an immigrant - I’m one myself, although not poor anymore. I’m just pointing out that pre-Uber system didn’t offer much protection either. Since driving is an easily obtainable skill with no differentiation whatsoever, driving for hire - be it a cab driver, truck driver, or Uber driver - will always be a low-earning job.
> The risk is much higher because it is not only about human deaths, but also about unusable land for decades and decades.

By that argument, I should also be accounting for the climate change effects of carbon fuels, the mining impact of basically everything including what renewable plants are made from (IDK about most, but turns out uranium’s easier and safer to mine than coal), and the environmental damage caused by us using so much energy.

I argue the reason for tight regulation is an entirely different risk: political risk. People fear it, demand control over it, vote for politicians who implement it. It’s not like any German reactor could’ve suffered tsunami-induced damage, but tsunami-induced damage in someone else’s reactor resulted in no more German reactors. A tsunami which, for the record, killed at least 15,895 people and caused a lot of environmental damage from all the consequent chemical spills. Yet no grand public international outcry against chemicals which can be spilled by a tsunami.

Humans are interesting, what we consider to be a risk or not. :)
Federal Reserve Educational Material on Bitcoin [pdf]