skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Story time!

When I was signing up for Internet at my new apartment, there were 3 ways I could do so: by contacting my apartment's official representative, online, and through the regular phone system.

I used all three. First, I contacted the representative, who gave me a price. Then I looked online and found the actual price (considerably lower). When I tried to sign up online, I was told I'd need to provide an extra security deposit because I have my credit reports frozen.

So I called the generic phone system. The agent gave me another price (lower than my official representative, but still higher than the website). I pointed out the website price, and the agent switched me to that price. I asked if I'd need to provide a security deposit and they said no. They finished signing me up, and everything was fine.

The whole process was annoying, I would have loved to have someone else do it for me. This was the perfect time for a phone assistant to step in. But that would have been a really bad idea with Duplex.

The point is - an automated call system probably doesn't protect you from an abusive representative. If I had Google Duplex handle either of my calls, I'd be paying more for my Internet right now, because I guarantee Duplex isn't smart enough to determine if a representative is lying about an advertised price.

95% of the time this probably doesn't matter, because most people I talk to on the phone aren't abusive. But if someone does want to upsell you or bury you in service fees or waste your time, Google Duplex is probably making their job easier, not harder.
If you own the domain name and back up your emails regularly I would say having the provider shut down wouldn't be more than a nuisance.
> Investors would be choosier about speculative opportunities because the yield on the risk-free asset would be much, much higher.

It won't help how choosy investors are, or how well the economy performs. The money supply is fixed. So for someone to make 120 bitcoins from an investment of 100 bitcoins, someone else has to lose 20 bitcoins, which would be other investors, or the public (workers / consumers).
The broad strokes ideals (read: dogmatisms) are cyclical, but technology still progresses. i.e., we shouldn't all ditch Clojure for K just because functional programming has had a heyday before; Clojure is a legitimate evolution of the paradigm. But it's also not unlikely that the present hype will die down in a few years and some new form of OOP will make a resurgence, ad infinitum.
> I worked in a company office of a company that was based aboot 200 miles away and our experiences were a lot different from each other.

Glassdoor lets users filter reviews based on company location, which appears to take care of that problem.
And if higher paying ads are necessary for the service to work?

Or do you foresee this being like drug prices, where the US subsidizes drug development for the world?
Per TFA, it wasn't being sold at a loss, it just wasn't being sold at great profit.
https://github.com/thbar/kiba

This has been the standard for years
Eh, you can find it in Brazil, made locally (so no reimporting issues), with no subsidies, for R$ 2,45 (around $0.70) for a box of 30 pills, retail.
As an EU citizen I am offended by this regulation.
America subsidizes more than just healthcare development for Europe. Our massive military budget provides global security/stability for all of our allies. No strong need to have a large expensive standing army if your ally has that covered.

>So the examples of European healthcare working well are (somewhat) contingent on price gouging Americans?

It's more related to the development of new healthcare technologies/medicine. Once a drug is developed it's super cheap to produce and distribute. Getting it developed is where $X billion is spent. If the US incentivized global pharmaceutical companies less by allowing for less profit, the drugs we have now would still exist but new development would probably decrease significantly. That said there are most likely solutions to this problem (government research into medicine instead of for-profit etc).
Likely not. People on twitter would like this to be the case, however, it is not.
Operating in China is a choice every one of these companies makes.
Butlerian Jihad
> The issue is systemic. Yeah, this drug only has a few people, another drug only has a few other people, etc. But looking at it from a per drug perspective is not seeing the forest through the trees.

I don't understand, because it sounds like you're trying to argue with what I'm saying, but we're literally making the same point.

Shkreli makes for an easy target because he's the absolute caricature of a villain. But at the same time, focusing on this drug misses the point. Even if Shkreli cut the price of the drug to $0, there would be no measurable effect on patients. And while not everyone is as overtly malevolent as Shkreli is, the incentives that cause this sort of behavior aren't caused by the pharmaceutical companies (nor can they really be fixed by the pharmaceutical companies - at least not systemically - because they're just responding to the incentives that have already been created).
That and also driven so many European subways (most called METRO) you never seen cars as overcrowded as in USA and barely people leaning over the door! In USA its normal to lean against the door because people are exactly gotten used to the fact the train will stop first before the door gets open.
> Nobody lost money in an FDIC insured account.

This is true for you & I. But the wealthy aren't concerned about the FDIC insurance as their balances are far in excess of what would be covered by it. They follow the health of a bank very closely as they stand to lose a great deal of money if it becomes insolvent.

Many people think what prompted the sale of Wachovia to first Citibank (briefly .. sort of) then Wells Fargo for $15.1 billion [0] in October of 2008 was the implosion of their MBS holdings in their Golden West Financial acquisition. If you recall, Golden West had the "Pick a Pay" program, where borrowers could decide how much their mortgage payment would be (potentially even less than the interest portion, where the remaining amount was lumped back in to the balance)

What really happened was the wealthy depositors in Wachovia got wind that the bank was in trouble and initiated massive withdrawals, causing a run on the bank. If the sale to WF hadn't happened that weekend and restored confidence in the bank, Wachovia would likely have not opened their doors on the following Tuesday. Source: coworkers who were there at the time.

[0] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/wells-fargo-to-merge...
"I'd love it if Facebook were nationalized"

What you're looking for already exists; install WeChat.
Build a Focus System for Better Work/Life Balance as a Web Developer
I'm tending to believe a traditional ToDo is too naive, too one-dimensional.

Tasks are a function of:

- priority
- completion time
- complexity

For example, if I'm fresh I should choose something that's complex and I have the time for. A higher priority (depending on deadline) might take less brain CPUs so maybe it waits.

Thinking of things simply in terms of priority ignores the most important component: your brain.
Does anyone have recommendations on where to learn how to discover this unused content?
I use GNU/Linux versus Android or ChromeOS
I recall seeing I think on 60 Minutes HFT that wanted worse latency but I can't recall why. They have massive spools of fiber optics using them as a "resistor" (my term) to slow down the transmission.

It seems to be the opposite of this but for the life of me I can't remember the advantage of doing it.

Found it: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/iex-app...
You're absolutely right! There's a huge need for standardized APIs for interacting with outside systems for this use-case. In your example, your doctor's office.

In practical terms, there may be some minor issues such as incompatible multiple implementations and adoption costs. But that's made much easier to handle by a very small number of expected consumer systems.

As for interactions with end-result partners, well. I've worked with standards designed to represent such highly general cases (xcbl and cxml). They're invariably rife with interoperability problems and other issues arising from overly broad standards. These tend to not get better over time as much as one might hope, as it's not easy to continuously update standards at a reasonable speed across N target types of partners. Keeping up with how usage evolves is never easy.

The best approaches to this that I've seen in use are those that focus on providing a vehicle for arbitrary data for delivery to the app - like HTTP or TCP. Getting more specific is the route to madness. Which, unfortunately, is probably precisely the bit you'd most like standards around.

You're completely right. There's a very real and very important need for standards here. There just might be some issues worth mentioning that might arise from the attempt to create and rely on them.
Mara is designed to be simpler than Airflow. It positions itself between plain scripts and Airflow.
I don't. I've got the rest of my life to tackle some tasks on my list. I have deadlines and personal priorities, which naturally float to the top of those lists, but until I decide that I'll never do one of them, I just let them fall to the bottom of the list. No big deal.
Pretty sure archists have argued about all your examples too.

A lot of things hinder software development: laws and regulations; skepticism of the community; lack of resources; technical constraints of existing hardware; trade secrets and patents to maintain an edge against competitors; ethics and morals incidental to the organization of society...

hell we're already in a place where people reflexively look at centralized services (and even decentralized services) and see future hierarchy.

not all hindrances are equal but

a) do you imagine anarchism to be a uniquely strong hindrance

b) do you consider that hindering of software development to be a sufficient issue to object to anarchy.
Apple could require the analytics reporting to be opt-in.
Same. Have a Pixel book and love having the same OS as the cloud.
I can't wait for them to use blockchain on next iteration to solve this issue.
Code signing will not fix this problem.

The DEVELOPER is corrupt, the code was not altered on delivery to you.
That makes insurance more expensive. Do you think insurance companies are some bottomless reserve of money hoarded by evil tycoons? This reasoning is why medical costs spiral out of control.

It's true that the system encourages this behavior through poorly designed incentives, but outrage and publicity is the only check on this. So the outrage is perfectly well-placed.
And even with that, we couldn't even manage a societal patch fix to this one drug.
How to Structure Good Hypotheses for Your Lean Startup (2011)
In Asana, you can forward emails to x@mail.asana.com and it will create a task for you. The headline is the title of the task and the body is the description.
Tell me the last time a major bank shut down and its proprietors ran off with all the deposits. Or what is the BTC equivalent to a chargeback if services aren't rendered? What protection does it offer if someone steals your information and makes fraudulent purchases with your money?
Things (https://culturedcode.com/things/) does pretty much that. It has a little Quick Entry daemon which lets you press control-option-space in Mail.app to make a new task linked to the selected mail. By default, the subject ends up as the task's title, though you can change it before hitting Return.

In general, I highlight recommend Things. It does all the typical GTD stuff, in a mostly Maclike way, and has a great iOS client.

[Edit: In fact, you can actually drag a mail right into a Things window as well, just as you propose. I never knew that!]
> Insurance premiums have been going up long before the ACA was passed into law.

They've gone up much faster after the ACA has gone into effect.
Functionally, it doesn't matter.
Everything is great about eshell except for one thing: the documentation is crap. Nobody uses it because it's hard to find out how to use it efficiently. Personally, when I launch eshell sometimes it takes me 10 minutes to google how to do basic operations, after which I quit eshell and forget about it for another couple of months.
Big for the schools in the US is CBs supporting AP CS 1 and 2 now out of the box.
I would have preferred it if this technology was developed at a university. It seems that the academic world is being replaced by the corporate world at a worrisome pace.
True. But it's also easy of falling into the trap of getting things done, but failing to be productive.

Doing things and doing the right things are two different things.
Windows critical flaw
Maybe that is so. But my point is still valid. If I PLAN to do this I cannot go to a country where salaries are much lower than in my home country where I want to return.
There is something so wrong with this comment that all the problems with today's tech culture can be extrapolated from it...
It's disconcerting to me that under the GDPR, online businesses appear to be losing the ability to deny services to a user who knowingly, and with clear consent, chooses to take personal responsibility over the data they provide to said businesses.

Regardless of whether this is for the "greater good", this is deeply unsettling territory.
I understand why the TODO list is a good idea. My memory is terrible, I get confused if I don't write down everything I was doing and everything I was planning to do the next day.

What I'm unsure about is whether the actual tech behind the TODO list matters. It seems we love to discuss this (or reimplement it!) because we're programmers and/or tech people, and tech naturally appeals to us. But I'm unsure Taskwarrior or any particular tool actually matters. I think what matters is that you keep a TODO list in whatever format is useful to you. To me, the discipline matters; the actual tech/UI behind it is pretty much irrelevant.
I used to believe #6 (never argue with your spouse in front of them). But if you and your spouse have a healthy relationship, displaying and modeling productive disagreement and arguing can be helpful. The world is full of disagreements. Where else will kids learn to properly "fight fair?"

It's likely wrong things will be said and mistakes made in the midst of an argument. When this happens, debriefing with the kid later can be a useful exercise in admitting your own faults, while also showing that life isnt always perfect.
> That makes insurance more expensive. Do you think insurance companies are some bottomless reserve of money hoarded by evil tycoons? This reasoning is why medical costs spiral out of control.

Yes, they are. They are permitted to raise premiums "as much as necessary" due to a lack of cost controls, and the ACA/Obamacare simply subsidizes insurance with little eye towards costs. They get their admin skim regardless. Your blame is misplaced.

If you want your drugs affordable, manufacture them without a profit motive (through a government sponsored entity, for example). Use government funding through the NIH, the NSF, and DARPA for drug development. Put cost controls in place and use Medicare as a single payer system. If you leave any room for profiting, someone will find a way to exploit it. That's capitalism.
What is there in the ETL space with bi-directional sync?

I don't usually run into problems where "transfer data from X to Y" is it. Usually it's "there's data in CRM X and data in Event system Y, merge the two keeping X as the master source"

There's Mulesoft et al but they seem overkill for small deployments, as well as being stupidly expensive [1].

1. I'm sure they're good value if you're an enterprise company. But if you don't need the UI builder and only 2-3 sources kept in sync, they are expensive. And with my reading of the documentation, conflict resolution isn't great either.
Prefer this GNu/Linux implementation. Far more secure.
Please take a moment and consider the implications of a nationalized company that tracks and records every thought of its users.
How did your work life lose all of its complexity? I long for a single todo.txt, but have settled on a directory of org-mode files :)
I run into this every once in a while, but the sticking point is always the mobile picture. If I want to add a todo item using my phone, what are my options?

Anyone have any experience with this?
You can have projects with 'pro:name'. You can have sub projects with 'pro:name1.name2'. You can specify that a task depends on another one with 'depends:id1'.

I'm not sure how well it works with a lot of tasks. You might need to use filters a lot. tasksh review[1] might be useful too.

[1]: https://taskwarrior.org/docs/review.html
I'm so glad they have Quenya.
> Energy and climate is something that very well may break our society.

Unfortunately, if you run almost any process that humans are doing right now that has even 1% growth, in 1000 years, that's a factor of 21000x (.5% is 146x), and we're dead. So pretty much everything has to reach an S curve and stabilize, or we are totally F'd. Population, energy usage, land usage, food, trash, inflation, everything.
I think you're referring to IEX, an exchange that adds a delay with those spools of fiber optics. According to wiki, "350 microsecond delay adds a round-trip delay of 0.0007 seconds and is designed to negate the certain speed advantages utilized by some high-frequency traders".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX
Edit: didn't saw your edit.
> I'm not sure why encouraging people to bury their wealth in the ground instead of doing something useful with it is something we want to be doing.

Savings is not "burying their wealth in the ground", it's building a safety net for the future. At least for everyday people. Most people would be better off doing that than blowing it on big screen tv's, boats, and cigarettes. If more people did that, society would be better off too.
This is a point I don't see raised nearly often enough. If their profit potential is capped at a percentage of total revenue, they have absolutely no incentive to truly attempt to reign in costs. As out of control costs can be used as evidence that, through no fault of their own, they need to increase rates substantially year after year.
They might call in and say they lost their token, and a competent attacker will usually have all the necessary info. Happens all the time with credit card fraud. Sure, you can notify the target that a credential was reissued, but that happens with credit cards too, and most of the time people don’t pay attention.

About 15% of the user population really cares about security and will take the right precautions. It’s the other 85% that are soft targets that keep attackers in business.
Yes. My strategy is to do a daily review. In the first few minutes of the day, I pull maybe 14 tasks out of the big list and into a Today list. Then I see only a manageable number the rest of the day.
If you’re looking to evade taxes or otherwise commit serious crimes, why on earth would you do so using an immutable public ledger? Any mistake and you’ve gift-wrapped the case for the prosecution.
Never thought ChromeOS was a browser. Plus already had Android support.
This is already the law. You are not responsible to pay debts incurred by another person. The problem is when the bank or company that gave credit to someone else that used your identity information is allowed to lie to a credit bureau about the fact that it was you who defaulted on the debt. Otherwise you could just tell the bank, "Pound sand stranger, I never borrowed any money from you. Stop bugging me or I'll get a restraining order.", and never have worry about how someone has pretended to be you to a bank.

Large fines for banks and companies that libel people by telling information brokers lies is the way to stop this problem. The idea that when this happens it is "identity theft" and the person whose identity was stolen is responsible for the problem is ridiculous. This problem should be called libel and the perpetrators (the entity reporting false info that hurts you) punished.
Stallman was right:

I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. (I made an exception for the fees for the stallman.org domain, since that is connected with me anyway.) I also avoid paying with credit cards . For freedom's sake, insist on paying cash. When a business pressures you to pay in an identified way, that means your help as a citizen is needed: say, "If you won't take my cash, no sale!"

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse
That would be a good idea and I'd support that. The only problem I think is that such things tend to break down once the size of a country scales. Like I'm not surprised such a system works great in Norway; there's only ~5 million people! A lot of the systems that worked fantastically in the US when it had a few million people broke down once it reached 300 million. Representative government begins to break down when one man is responsible for representing 500,000 individuals intead of 30,000. Scale really fucks with things in unpredictable ways. It really makes you understand how China and India can have such widespread and pervasive problems.
Genuinely curious: how do you manage commitments etc. without a todo list?
I wonder whether any of the large networked navigation software does random early drop.
Some ETLs these days are simple scripts - e.g. Spark, Dataflow - with their config files.
Python is more a glue in this case. Most operations are basically unix pipes pushing data in and out of Postgres
Now that said I am not trying to convince you to be an anarchist, I'm just asking you to reflect on whether your questions (and their possible answers) are actually meaningful to you or if you actually want to ask some things more fundamental but can't quite figure out what.
> SOA & Micro Services are not the same.

Microservices by theory are a return to the early theory of SOA, which may frequently have been diverged from in practice, but that probably happens with microservices, too.

> Services in 90s & 2000 are SOA in a monolith.

The theory of SOA is loose coupling through independent services interacting through a shared communication medium. That may not always have been observed strictly in practice, but that's true of microservices, too.
The long-term trend is caused by gains in productivity brought about by saving and investment with private property protections.

The boom-bust cycle is brought about by inflationary banking.
perhaps such companies make people sign strict NDAs
Taskwarrior's mobile app is sufficient, though configuration for use of a taskserver is fiddly. There are cloud taskservers (I use https://inthe.am, but you can host your own, too.)