skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What semi-decent human being inside Uber came up with this?

Susan Fowler advocated for ending forced arbitration as the "the single most important thing a company can do to prove to its employees that it is dedicated to acting ethically, legally, responsibly, and transparently":

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/5/20/five-things-tech...

No-forced-arbitration should be the norm.

What other companies have the worst forced arbitration clauses?
wallflower has more than made amends by providing some of the best reading on Hacker News for many years.
[Discussion] What are your religious beliefs do they affect your STEM work?
Does your religiosity or lack thereof affect your career/output/thinking in technical fields? How do you reconcile diverse beliefs which, in my view, are hard to reconcile? Did your views on religion change or evolve as you came to grasp more technical knowledge?

From personal experience, I was raised slightly religiously but found these beliefs to bear no meaningful fruits in my teenage years. I have yet to be convinced of the value of religious modes of thought, as I can imagine secular wellsprings for all the purported benefits of religious activities.

I am curious about your diverse thoughts, because there were really great responses by Christians in another unrelated thread.
State department bug bounty gets rare thumbs u
Is business Skype that bad? I gather it was a separate product (Lync) that they later decided to slap a Skype logo on.
completely anecdotal, but I just interviewed a candidate for an open position at my employer yesterday via skype. His laptop in Ohio to our conference room in California. Went off without a hitch (except my colleague couldn't figure out how to hang up -- "It's the big red icon there ... no the red one ... the red one"). Our equipment was a basic PC running Win7 and a HD web cam resting on top of a wall-mounted 70" LCD television.
People gotta eat.
My problem with this link is that anyone can edit it and it looks like anyone can be an author on the site, so I question the validity of the article.
Data classes was an interesting read and will definitely save some time in the future, but I think the __slots__ mention is where I got the most value from (big memory and access speed savings!).

Additional reading on __slots__: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472000/usage-of-slots
Re—organizing the windows os under the cloud services division felt like it really spoke to the software with windows vision
Ask HN: How do I learn math/physics in my thirties?
I'm in my early thirties and I feel I've not really made any significant effort in learning math/physics beyond the usual curriculum at school. I realize I didn't have the need for it and didn't have the right exposure (environment/friends) that would have inculcated in me these things. And perhaps I was lazy as well all these years to go that extra mile.

I have (had) a fairly good grasp of calculus and trigonometry and did a fairly good job working on a number of problems in high school. But over the past 12-13 years, I've really not had any need to flex my math muscles other than a problem here or there at work. Otherwise it's the same old enterprise software development.

I follow a bunch of folks on the internet and idolize them for their multifaceted personalities - be it math, programming/problem solving, physics, music etc. And these people had a natural flair for math/physics which was nurtured by their environment which made them participate in IOI/ACPC etc. in high school and undergrad which unfortunately I didn't get a taste of. I can totally see that these are the folks who have high IQs and they can easily learn a new domain in a few months if they were put in one.

Instead of ruing missed opportunities, I want to take it under my stride in my thirties to learn math/physics so as to become better at it. I might not have made an effort till now, but I hopefully have another 40 years to flex my muscles. I believe I'm a little wiser than how I was a few years back, so I'm turning to the community for help.

How do I get started? I'm looking to (re)learn the following - calculus, linear algebra, constraint solving, optimization problems, graph theory, discrete math and slowly gain knowledge and expertise to appreciate theoretical physics, astrophysics, string theory etc.
It has aliases. Both built in and user definable. In fact, there are default aliases that match many of the utilities you're used to.

You might know that if you'd spent more than 30 seconds with it before shouting "it's not bash!".
The problem with dataclasses are:

1) they don’t support __slots__ and default values

2) type hints aren’t supported yet, and it doesn’t appear they’ll be added to the 3.6 backport

The former issue will be resolved (maybe in 3.8?) but it will require either a metaclass approach or the @dataclass decorator to build a separate class.

The good news is that dataclasses (the backport) work on PyPy 6.0.0.
Oh, I see, I misunderstood. Thank you for clarifying. That's very interesting! I wonder if these experiences would be have common brain pathways
You might be interested in this:

http://www.emuvr.net/
The headline is evocative of the introduction to the book "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt. That book was transformative for me.
The locus of control around an API
The great lie of libraries is that they ought to do anything automatically. In fact, they ought do nothing automatically, and only ever do just as much as the intent of the programmer. And their API ought to seek to clarify that intent, not hide multiple intents behind a brand name.
How China's Tech Revolution Threatens Silicon Valley
Just because something isn’t false doesn’t mean it’s not highly biased.
> But you're not comparing like for like.

I'm trying to. The standardized annual power consumption that is advertised on the energy rating is only accurate if you use the default settings for 40 and 60°C cotton cycles. And that is effectively 4 hours at 40°C for a partial load. I saw the advertised "turbowash" cycle, however while it's supposed to be energy efficient, you have to take LG's word for it.

In the US, while models differ in size, if you look at a similar price range and load capacity, you'll see that numbers used for the energy rating are pretty similar (around 100 kWh or less). But, to my knowledge, the default cycles are fairly short. Sadly neither Samsung nor LG seem to publish cycle length in their manuals.
It's microplastics that are the main problem, and it's primarily not macro physical impact (trapping creatures in plastic) it's biological and chemical impact on the organisms affected; in part due to other chemicals carried with, or accumulated with, the microplastics.

That bag in landfill can break down to small particulates that get washed away to local rivers which are cleaned out in to the sea.

https://eic.rsc.org/feature/the-massive-problem-of-microplas...
Except social media is engineered to make everyone a public figure, so you aren't just going to be rebuked by the crowd; your family and employment get targeted.

This is why social networks in their current form are a lousy way of expressing original thought. Even if you don't say things particularly controversial, if they're not in line with the lowest common denominator, the chance you'll see any legitimate engagement is slim.

Forums, on the other hand, are largely anonymous. You'll definitely be put on blast for what you say, but the inherent anonymity helps to deter the angry crowd from shutting down conversation by default. Of course, it depends on who is running the forum. Reddit, as much of a cesspool as parts of it are, is a modern example of how anonymity leads to far more productive conversation than one may ever see on the likes of Facebook or Twitter. Yes, Reddit shuts down subreddits it doesn't like on occasion, but it's overall more hospitable to an exchange of ideas. Good luck having those same conversations on social media, even if you manage to use a pseudonym.
Secure NPM
A lawyer being paid to mitigate risk for the company using industry best practices? Uber has 6700 employees are you calling them all bad people for choosing to make a living working for one of the premier tech companies? The world isn't black and white where you're on the good side and those people tangentially related to that thing you don't like are bad people.

If we really want to improve on these problems we can't be so self-righteous.
How big of a pad will you have to build in Antarctica to deflect heat from any ice that might be structurally supporting the base?
Idk if it's still the case, but Google used to have a user agent detection to make Firefox way slower. If you spoof a Google Chrome User-Agent, Google maps became way faster. I don't know if it's still the case.

Officially it was because of compatibility problems but I've never faced problem when spoofing Chrome UA on Google Maps so Idk what to think about this excuse.
This seems better, it's more about tradeoffs.

I don't really feel the need to complain about languages. I just find the workaround and implement it and move on. All languages have trade offs. I can tell you that this one lends more to scaling projects or this one is easier to maintain, this one is easier to iterate, etc. But getting upset doesn't do anything. You just pick the best you can and work with it. I'm not going to get mad that my hammer isn't also a drill.
> This, combined with all the tech needed for a Mars colony, would make it trivial to build a permanent settlement in Antarctica.

> A domed, self-sufficient, city in Antarctica would also be a cheap way to test most (not all) of the tech needed for Martian self-sufficiency

GP is talking about testing the rockets in Antarctica.
Now how do I remove Pocket?

No, I said "remove".
Excellent read for a beginner like me who wanted to learn functional programming with an already familiar language.
The point of boilerplate
is that you might change any word of if on a given project. If you never change the boilerplate it should be a library.

Correlary: if you always invoke a library slightly differently it should be boilerplate.
So this seems to be a pattern. The link that I posted elsewhere in this thread and the occurrence there was precisely because of poor support. (Again, I'm not affiliated with that guy in any way)
EveryRFC: an RFC search engine
>I have a Linux distribution whose PID 1 is a Tcl shell

Interested! Available?
Lync was nice and actually worked pretty well. Last time I used Skype for business though, it was like they took out all the parts of Lync that worked well and replaced them with the worst parts of (non-business) Skype.
Wouldn't having the camera at the top of such a large screen (in portrait as demo-ed in the video) exacerbate the lack of eye content in a video call? If it's noticeable on a laptop sized screen I can't imagine how off-putting it would be on this.
>But really, these are ballistic trajectories. Are we going to put everyone in G suits?

I assume you mean because minimum-energy ballistic trajectories[1] come into the atmosphere very steeply, so the G-forces are much higher.

But by using flatter trajectories (closer to an orbit than a parabolic "hop"), you reduce the angle of entry considerably, at the expense of using more fuel.

The result is that for Earth-to-Earth rockets, essentially all trip distances require the same amount of fuel.

>It takes about 30 minutes between when they start loading people onto a plane and when they take off (and baggage is already on!).

I wonder if they can pack baggage into a lightweight "carriage" during the boat ride, the simply load that single carriage onto the rocket. Or even a few carriages.

It will incur a mass penalty ("box within a box"), which means fewer passengers. But if it speeds up total trip time it could improve competitiveness with long-distance plane trips.

Either that, or just force everyone to buy SpaceX-brand standardized luggage that's ultra mass-efficient and supports automated handling/loading. :)

[1] http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2014/06/travel-on-airless-w...
In the wild, hopefully not, but I do remember coming across /bin/sh executing csh in an obscure RTOS-ish / proprietary flavor of Linux that we were prototyping at a previous employer. Would've been around 2008. I can't remember the variant, but I remember being caught off-guard by it.
HN's stance is here

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I'd be greatly surprised if there's any Linux support at all. Microsoft supports macOS, iOS, and Android these days not because they care about interoperability, but because Microsoft needs users on these platforms. If Microsoft cared about interop. for the sake of anyone except Microsoft, OOXML wouldn't be crap, and their office suite wouldn't be crippling ODF files on save.

Microsoft has a much longer (and quite colourful) history of not-supporting and breaking interop.
4TB Machines on Google Cloud Platform
Since the FP crowd is here, why is loading a program into memory, writing a register, or calling a function not seen as a side effect, but writing to disk is seen as a side effect? Or have I got it wrong?
The counterargument is that you are welcome not to do business with companies that require you to accept such a condition, just as you are welcome not to accept a job with such a condition. Unemployment rates are about as low as they ever get right now; work somewhere else. Freedom means that you can voluntarily enter into arrangements that others think are a bad idea. Is it worth a little extra pay to accept that condition? A lot of extra pay? The market will figure it out. Banning the practice, on the other hand, removes a bit of freedom.

Of course, that argument is largely baloney, but it's not straight up insane.
Comptroller’s report blaming Airbnb for higher rents is wrong, unpaid for
On the __slots__, the article claims that these do: https://realpython.com/python-data-classes/#optimizing-data-...

EDIT:
From PEP 557: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0557/#support-for-automa...

“Support for automatically setting __slots__?

At least for the initial release, __slots__ will not be supported. __slots__ needs to be added at class creation time. The Data Class decorator is called after the class is created, so in order to add __slots__ the decorator would have to create a new class, set __slots__, and return it. Because this behavior is somewhat surprising, the initial version of Data Classes will not support automatically setting __slots__. There are a number of workarounds:

- Manually add __slots__ in the class definition.

- Write a function (which could be used as a decorator) that inspects the class using fields() and creates a new class with __slots__ set.”
The Truth Protocol That’s Missing from the Web
Learning React: Is This ES6 or React?
Hello Protovue – Prototyping Component Framework for Vue.js
I rarely read the article these days because the comments can give you context the article doesn't
If it’s not one thing, it’s another: the challenge of compound weather events
Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test and Tech Culture
I'm staunchly opposed to war, but understand it's unfortunate necessity under certain extreme circumstances.

If these types of projects make war machines more precise overall, they may actually decrease overall collateral damage and reduce the total time war is waged which could cause less lives to be lost during war.

Until us humans can collectively overcome the various problems that cause war, might be worth it for the best minds to help make war machines as precise as possible.
Is this an US thing?

I always assumed that no contract can be "above" the law.

In fact I just checked the Constitution in my country and it specifically says that no other law can cancel the fact anyone can address justice.
That and people being enraged by just about everything. There's a lot in the world to be troubled by, but to always have visceral reactions towards things happening around the world must be taxing on one's health. I don't think a day goes by where I don't see a post by someone making a banal statement about some issue... and I'm supposed to "like" that they've managed to think the same things millions of average Joes and Janes already believe.
I'd be really interested if anyone has a book or similar on supply and demand curves estimation by experiment. Ideally I'm looking for a cookbook type book less so than a theory book.

If you're referring to financial markets, I personally learned a lot from Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners, although I didn't finish it. But it explains the basic characteristics of financial markets, and why they are set up the way they are. It isn't necessarily going to be obvious and financial markets are based on hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge.
This wasn't him being a tightwad. This was him proving to everyone that he had enough money to not have to play by the rules.
It's very much what he said. "Internet data connection might be mainstream, but Internet, as in websites, blogs, genuine, independent content, is really not."

He specifically says that using the internet for blogs and websites (i.e. things other than Facebook) is not "mainstream". Maybe the Facebook comment was not intended to say that's what the "mainstream" use case is, but that's how it reads, and I'm frankly not sure what mainstream usage would be if it's not "websites".
What's wrong with something that's decades old? Bash is great for command line and small scripts. It's once you surpass 100 lines where things get problematic. At that point, you're not writing a shell script, you're writing a tiny application and need to treat it as such.
I think that speaks more to the vastly more difficult task of playing defense than offense.

There's a great dad joke that relates: if you have a boy, you only have to worry about one little prick, but if you have a girl, you have to worry about all the little pricks out there.
That's about it, though. All companies discontinue products, but Microsoft keeps them around for a lot longer than most.
So in my last company, we tried so many different CRMs. Salesforce, Salesforce IQ, Close.io, Pipedrive, and more. What we discovered that none of them allowed us to work the way that we wanted. Integrating with some of their APIs was more work than we wanted to do, they were expensive, and entirely closed source.

Pickle is designed to help you stay lean, allows you to create multiple projects (so you can use it at home, work, side projects, etc) with one login.

For example: People are using it to manage guest lists, for an event/wedding/party, using it to be transparent with their clients (see: https://picklecrm.com/home-buying-timeline.html), to manage personal affairs at home like they children's clubs and groups.

You're definitely right: we should add more screenshots!
Indeed. The current 55" 1080p Surface Hub is $10-12K.

The image staying still as the screen rotates is gimmicky but being able easily to move and spread content between multiple Surface Hubs could be really useful.
Many modern 3D design systems have layered pie-style context menus and mouse gestures.
Lyft for example? Or Airbnb? They have forced arbitration clauses as well.

We'll see if they match Uber's commitment here.
Exhibit A: When I joined Google Fiber, one of my first projects was converting a (POSIX) shell script that had grown to 1200 lines to Python. It became something that anyone could modify, including interns, rather than something that required at least a code review from our L7 tech lead, whose time was better spent elsewhere (he was the author and our only competent shell programmer).
Scalable Chat Back End with PubNub
"That it's not Haskell" -- gold
Yes but that's years before. I'm talking dotcom era.
Encryption scheme choice doesn't mean much if the devices send all the data to US-controlled "clouds". NSA will be able to read everything anyway.
He did this when he was young and healthy.
It’s time to refactor when
It feels like fixing the bugs in the system might be slower than taking a step back and designing something simpler, with less room for bugs.
You should change the title of this to "market research" which resonates more with researching the market for researching a startup.
To add to the other reply:

> Sorta pretentious to just define life to fit existing narratives when you don't have an explanation.

I’m having trouble understanding where you’re going with this sentence.

I’m not defining life, I’m saying there isn’t a definition of life (that I know of) which seems satisfactory.

Also, I don’t think it would be pretentious to start with a definition that fits existing narratives, because that’s how most words work: a label for a bunch of examples, followed by a rule — a definition — which creates a pattern for those examples. Like fire “metabolising” oxygen and fuel to reproduce and “move”, but not being alive. When you find edge cases, either change the definition to fit the new data or create a new category for the new data [1]. I know that domain experts don’t use that previous definition of life for exactly the reason I gave, but last I checked “are viruses alive?” still got arguments.

Also also, treating life as a fifth fundamental force of the universe when chemistry explains all the components just fine is… well, literally pretentious.

[1] That’s just an IMO about language, of course: if language was that simple then NLP would be a solved problem.
Social Credit: Orwellian Nightmare, or a “Crude Tool”?
Forced arbitration is beyond illegal, it is illogical. The entire basis of a contract is that it's a meeting of minds. If a written agreement purports that one party to it has the power to unilaterally interpret it, then its very words lack all independent meaning. And without meaning, there is no actual contract!
> The counterargument is that you are welcome not to do business with companies (...) Of course, that argument is largely baloney, but it's not straight up insane.

This is the idea of "freedom" that the right wing loves pushing, that all things that matter can be discussed as one-to-one interactions.

The argument is baloney because if all companies do it you don't really have a choice. You won't see this fact if you always think in terms of one-to-one interactions.

"Freedom" as one-to-one interactions is structurally favorable to large corporations.
The modern take on Tcl arrived almost 20 years ago, when "everything is a string" turned into "everything is a typed object with a string representation". The docs are clear and complete, and the concepts it uses make it a powerful and elegant tool.
The rule of law isn't circumvented by EULAs; if the law prohibited the terms, they would be invalid. The rule of law supports the EULAs.

Now, you may think that the law is bad, but that's different from this being a failure of the rule of law; it's success in the rule of (bad) law.
Dunno, why do "scripting", it's a rather clean oop language. For scripting use bash or perl maybe.
Kudos to those who is ready to stand for their principles.

If you are at G and thinking whether you should resign or not, remembers this - the market for AI talent is super hot. You will immediately find lots of great and challenging AI work pushing humanity forward
Being in your thirties has little to do with learning. How you learn is much more important than your age.

If you learn best in a classroom, you may have a local college that teaches math in the evenings. (I got my Master's in Statistics that way.)

If you learn best in small chunks, Khan Academy has differential and integral calculus and linear algebra, to start you out.

If you learn best from books... there are hundreds of great textbooks.

Best wishes to you. Keep up a lifetime of learning!
> Mr. West said the company struggled with the decision to commit to a safety transparency report for its rides, because he knows that it will be “disturbing” when the actual number of assaults that happen on Uber is announced — in part because of the company’s size and the ease with which customers can report an incident.

This seems like the wrong attitude to have…