skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two start-ups, Exotec & CommonSense, have recently unveiled small footprint AS/RS and mobile robot combinations.

CommonSense has built a more familiar gantry crane system on rack with a single purpose mobile robot on the ground (albeit in a much smaller form factor than found in a normal distribution center).

Exotec appears to be filling both storage / retrieval and transportation functions with a single general purpose robot that can traverse rack on tracks and move freely on the ground.

In high throughput applications, Exotec's loss of specialization will lead to lower speeds (i.e. an AS/RS robot designed only to move on rack will outperform a robot design to move on rack & the ground). In low throughput applications, the design could save money by reducing the total number of servos and motors that the system would require.

Both start-ups appear to be layering additional business models (fulfillment service or third party logistics) into their business model so the unit economics may not make sense to purchase one of these automation solutions on a capex business case. It will be interesting to see if the AS/RS incumbents begin exploring similar mini-solutions.
Ok, so, maybe the revised email should be more forceful and say “this is a bad idea.” I have no problem with being told what I’m proposing is a bad idea.

As to the supposed “danger,” I think the author may be reading into it too much. Linus himself says he could “live with” the changes. That, to me, does not sound in any way dangerous. What he has a problem with is the reasoning behind why these changes should be made. “This is a bad idea” covers that.

Quibbling over wording doesn’t change the fact that he can effectively get the point across in half the words without insulting anyone or going off on a rant.
Ask HN: Which developer/tech conferences are you going to in Q3/Q4 2018?
Lots of people gave great writing advice in this thread, so I'm going to throw out something different that may or may not resonate with you: Watch seasons 1-4 of the West Wing on Netflix. If you come across an episode that sticks with you, watch it a couple more times, maybe even put it on like background music (Sorkin's dialog often feels melodic).
Thanks for pointing me towards "Dark Background and Light Text". Having a dark background and light text is something that's very important to me.
The press release is misleading - no one is claiming 98% of the DNA is "junk", contrary to what the press release claims with no evidence. Regulatory regions around genes are understood be crucial to gene function and taught in undergraduate education. Usually people claim that mobile elements + repetitive regions constitute the "junk" region, which is about 40% of the genome. Also, there are dozens of studies showing you can survive with large chunks of it missing. Each human in fact has thousands of such structural variations.
The thing is, on the engineering level, one can only do so much. You may design the most beautifully controlled high precision weapon with all the interlocks and whatever.

Nothing of that matters if layers above you casually bribe people left and right in order to more freely sell to even worse people than what your democratically elected leaders decided were OK - and that first set of prospective customers are probably not so pretty in the first place, because you know, realpolitik and trade-offs. :-/
Exactly this! I'm also using Tab Center Redux to have tabs on the left side, which seems better UX- and space-wise for me even with just a few tabs open, although in the past I've used Firefox's default UI as well for a long time and it worked fine, unlike Chrome's UI.

This is how my Firefox looks like:

https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203716.png

https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203804.png

Once a while I'm getting to 1000-2000 open tabs and this is a point where the whole UI starts to feel a bit heavy, which is the only reason I clean them up then - navigating is a non-issue.
Ooooh. I've seen this page before, but it is a great submission. Fascinating article about something I'd never heard of before. Thanks for the link.
I wouldn't touch the Electric Smart. It has terrible fit and finish, and the range is terrible for a fully electric cars (up to 58 miles), some plug in hybrids get almost as much fully electric range (Chevrolet Volt up to 53 miles).

Granted the Electric Smart is "only" $23K, but you have to look at the overall value (e.g. depreciation, utility, battery aging). I'd prefer to pay $27K for a plug-in Prius Prime (up to 25 mile electric, then gas).
Interesting. What's the explanation for that?
I don't recall, and Google is now useless because there's apparently been a spate of research over some cinnamon byproduct that now helps the liver, so that's all that comes up in the results. IIRC, whichever one was the variety that is commonly sold in the US. Sorry I can't be more sure.
so having a consensual relationship with anyone involved in the organisation is a bad thing ... If she got promoted, would it be because of her work, or her relationship with the boss?

I'm not sure if I buy this completely. You see, a manager is human after all which means he/she is going to like some people more than others. There is always some kind of relationship with all the others, no way around it. Now obviously if the manager is only going to look at this relationship, his/her personal affection for others and not their work, and give some advantages over others based on that relationship, yes that is bad. Seeing that, and seeing an actual romatic relationship is just a more involved type of relationship, 'simply don't sleep with the people you manage' is obviously not enough. You should be able to put all or most personal things aside. As such I think these rules of no romantic relationships are a bit strange. Even if you follow that rule, but for the rest still manage people based on your personal relationship with them, it's still bad.
superlogout.com v2.0
Yeah, it seems like something the payment processors have to handle automagically in some manner. Otherwise, small online merchants are going to have no practical choice other than 1.) Selling through e.g. Amazon or 2.) Just ignoring the law.
Indeed, that's the digital equivalent of the $5 padlock. Sure, you could pry it open with a crowbar, but most people won't. IMHO the situation is more of "opportunity makes a thief" rather than "keeping honest people honest" - crossing the line is very explicit in both cases, analog and digital.
What sort of changes? I was under the impression that you know when your blood sugar levels are so high. Did you lose any weight?
I suspect you're imagining a single relationship in your head, and imagining that it could go well. Yes, indeed it could. But you have to think at scale. If you have ten of these sorts of relationships in your company, the odds of one of them going kerflooey in an expensive or damaging way is effectively 100%. Heck, the odds of five of them going kerflooey in an expensive or dangerous way has to be at least 90%.

You can't write policy based on imagining single incidents. At scale, power dynamics will be abused, full stop.
Intel had a pretty rough year with discovered exploits, poor PR and serious production issues for their tech.

How to discreetly solve the above issues? Have the CEO resign due to a reason that is not related in any way to his capacity of being a CEO. Put new CEO in the driver's position and have the board tell him where to go.

Usually CEOs have a nice package, even with a resignation, with some stocks and goodies so most likely everyone won in this case.
More compliance and regulation for us to deal with. How about you just tax property? It doesn't move. And also, how about the state stops spending money?
Good point. The "price" one would be willing to exchange for their integrity might be acquisition of power, fame or some other five-sense "prize".
> they were trying to get the security@apple.com people to at least forward messages when I did a full disclosure release after not receiving a response

That sounds a bit dysfunctional on Apple's part that they can't exert that kind of control over their own employees for an issue with potentially enormously negative consequences.
Fascinating mix of justices on this one:

> The vote was 5 to 4. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.

I can't imagine we're gonna see RBG agreeing with the Alito/Gorsuch/Thomas clan too often.
The funny thing is that Musk is literally destroying his public image with this. I mean, who will believe his nice nerd image if he's standing with blood stained face laughing about the crippled dead body of this ex employee of his. Not many better ways of public image suicide out there.
That is my normal work.

Our manager doesn't have a clue how systems work, so it's up to us to find the best way. I know the various areas we need to develop to push the system forward and it is up to me to find the best way to do it. If I learn something new that makes me rethink something, then I am more than welcome to revisit it and try out some new things. If it ends up with a better system then we all benefit. At the end of the day the work that needs to get done does get done.

Obviously I do have to use my judgement to allocate time appropriately. If there is a customer screaming at accounts because they were overcharged or whatever, then it is quite obvious I need to resolve that issue rather than work on a new way to style our buttons, but for the majority of the time it is up to me.

I do also spend quite a lot of my own time working on various things where it is a bit ambiguous as to whether it is 'proper' work or not. I enjoy the work I do because I don't feel like I am working in a sweat shop..

Maybe I'm just lucky to have always found a job where management trusts the developers.
Middle managers who want to find love at work can do it outside their departments - unlike the CEO who is everyone’s superior.
For my part: no, but complaining about it does.
I feel the effort I put onto writing tutorials might be well invested in furthering my knowledge on that topic instead. There are plenty of books & YouTube videos, even the official documentation to go through if one desires to learn the fundamentals and beyond.
Outside of the general scaffolding to society that law enforcement plays (e.g. "keeping the order") I have never been personally assisted in any real way by the law.

My experience is that law has been gamed and weaponized, wielded generally by the most powerful and able, and that even in situations of crime the police do not take anything that doesn't track to a big precinct objective seriously.

I've literally had a police officer laugh at me after I suggested he might be able to investigate a spree of car break-ins and thefts in my neighborhood.

A homicide attempt against my family saw the perpetrator - well connected to a network of lawyers and wealthy - escape the jaws of punishment.

On the flip side I've been harassed by police and the justice system for minor infractions or entire misunderstandings - and due to political demonstrations have a good sense that I'm registered in both my municipal and national domestic threat scoring and surveillance systems as a "possible threat".

I've spoken to friends and family about this and they share the same experiences.

I was raised on TV and media that portrayed police as neighbors and good natured civilians, but the reality for me has tracked much closer to thuggishness and intimidation.

Yes personal anecdotes only, but stolen bicycles, multiple car windows smashed and robbed, houses broken into, aggressive drivers, calls regarding domestic abuse, dangerous situations - all with friends and family generally encouraging each other not to call the police because it won't do anything to help the situation.
Stripe already recommends Avalara and a couple others:

https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration
It’s good for big business and bad for small businesses because compliance will be tough, and harder to compete and price.
If they're not all involved, it won't work, but firefox really lead asm.js, which was the actual precursor to webassembly. NaCL was more like a competitor that tried to do something similar but never got the kind of mainstream adoption needed for cross-browser support.
That's easy, I'm working on a computational kernel (for a scientific simulation of fluid dynamics) right now that loses ~20% performance the second you compile it with -fwrapv in GCC (the corresponding factor is slightly smaller in clang, because it's worse at optimizing it in the first place). I haven't invested enough effort in it yet to tell you if I could beat the compiler with manual optimizations in a sane amount of time, but the difference is certainly pronounced.

I haven't stumbled across anything new or unique here, it's just that most people don't write compute-constrained kernels that often these days. The optimization benefits of UB for signed integers are well known, and that's just one useful example of UB in C compilers.

And again, I'm fully on board with the notion that many people would be better off with a more error tolerant subset of what C does - and there's a lot of languages that provide just that. I'm just saying there are real costs to the change and they matter.
Show HN: FRP Ball Bounce
At Microsoft, the Chairman and CEO Bill Gates married the project manager for Microsoft Bob and Encarta, Melinda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
And as a seller you are required to register with every state, and collect + pay taxes quarterly in every state. Quite onerous for smaller sellers.
"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.
It's also common for employees at the same level to give performance reviews to each other. This is better dealt with by having a higher-level manager adjust for relationships.
Someone needs to develop a service to make calculating and paying the sales tax easier. Something like plugin an address and it spits out the tax percentage and where to remit the payment to. Ideally the states would get together and create a centralized service so companies don't have to be mailing checks to every single county government that has a sales tax.
If a programmer is using a "cross-cutting" concern to do "control flow" then the issue with the programmer.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/papers/kiczales-ECOOP1997-AOP.p...
The EU’s war on what makes the internet great
He clearly doesn’t have a problem with the code, otherwise he wouldn’t say he could “live with” the changes. This portion could be better worded to convey the “code is ok, but the rationale is flawed” message. How would you rewrite it?
Exposing consumers to more regressive sales taxes is in no way good for the country. What would be good for the country is to abolish sales taxes entirely.
Giant Oil Find Set to Bring Guyana Startling Riches – Maybe
The assumption being that the personae are not linkable to each other. Is that a realistic assumption?
Intel CEO Resigns Over Past Relationship with an Employee – Motherboard
I have an S3 bucket for mine.

E.g. a js closure memory leak:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=315190

https://s3.amazonaws.com/chromebugs/memory.html
I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.
> Oops.

> Sorry, we can't seem to find what the problem is.

> TRY AGAIN?

A little disappointing but the link to the book this is based on at the bottom of the page is good. Maybe put that front-and-centre for failures like this?
The author sounds like someone raised their voice at him once, and he swore he would never ever forgive the world for that insult.

Politically unconscious and otherwise inarticulate.
If you're interested in Murakami in general, his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is really interesting, showing the intersection of Marathons and writing in his life.
I've tried using Firefox for a month last month and decided to switch back to Chrome for a couple of reasons.

Firstly and most importantly none of the extensions that I use seem to sync settings which make it very annoying when you have 3 computers that you're using daily (Linux, MacOS, and Windows).

Sometimes it just still crashes and it's annoying.

Firefox doesn't support debugging websockets like Chrome does.

Opening file types in Firefox is a bit annoying, it constantly asks it every single time for a file type it never saw before. Just let me save it damnit, I don't want to be bothered about the file type.

How do you even open PDFs in Firefox? If I set the file handler to Firefox itself, then it will recursively open the file in Firefox.

Firefox doesn't play well with window manager like i3. Sometime when I'm working with Firefox, I'll need to force a resize of the window before Firefox notices that it's not a 1000px wide, but 500px wide. This happens very often. If you're saying that I should report this. I really cannot be bothered most of the time because I'm not a huge fan of their issue tracking software and most of these already have bug reports, but are just ignored.

Firefox sometimes doesn't know how to handle a font and it makes it unreadable for some reason, alright?

Firefox and dark mode GTK themes don't mix well together. You still have to manually add some CSS to what Firefox loads on every page just to make website input text readable or not black. Firefox uses the theme's settings for most stuff when it doesn't make sense when the whole web assumes you're using a white theme.

That's about it I guess?
Agreed,
The author in summary states:

> It [the rewrite] has 43% as many words, but loses none of the meaning. It's still forceful and unambiguous.

Yet, I found the rewrite to be feeble and ambivalent.

> If you were in the "I'm afraid that being nicer would hurt Linux" group, do you think that this email is worse?
Yes.

I wanted to add one additional question. Are there environments where ad hominem and disrespect are actually important cultivators of competency and reverence for the nature of the underlying task. Might there be instances where the collective is better off with Mr. Torvalds than Mr. Rogers?
His pawn cheated and killed my pawn
Finance people – how to cross over from Dev?
I've worked for 7 years as a Full-stack/Data engineer, but I'm more interested in the financial markets than my job. I'd like to move into Quantitative Trading/Analysis. What's the best way to cross over?

Is it worthwhile to get a Masters in Finance before making the switch?

PS - I live in Denver, CO, which doesn't have a ton of financial firms.
If there's one thing that career DC-ites can agree on, it's that citizens and (most) corporations need to pay their pound of flesh to the government.
I disagree with his argument that for anyone to use P2P storage, it has to be less expensive than S3. It's true that this will be hard to do, for all the reasons he listed. But some amount of people will be willing to pay a premium for P2P storage, because it can't be censored or ordered to be deleted as easily as data stored on S3. Pirates, journalists, and activists will appreciate this use case.

There's also another economic reason for why people would pay extra to use P2P storage. I'm sure there's some sort of term for this, but many people have stacks of cryptocurrencies that they can't or don't want to exchange for their day-to-day currency. Maybe their government restricts exchanges, the funds came from a questionable source, they have some philosophical issue with "fiat" currency, or they're just avoiding taxes. If you need to store 50TB of data, and have $900 in your checking account and 400 ETH in your wallet, you'd probably choose P2P storage over S3.
I think you're on to something there.
>> the stakes are enormous

This is the key difference between kernel development and other volunteer efforts.

Most volunteer efforts are worse off when people are scared away by strong language and pointed explanations of their shortcomings because their performance isn't really that important. It's not that big of a deal if you spill something at the food kitchen or goof up part of the set of the school play.

The kernel is not a typical volunteer effort. You can't show up with nothing but goodwill and be a net good. It requires skill and discipline, and people who don't have that but try to inject themselves into the process need to be told to go away for the good of the project. Pretending otherwise only causes people to get their feelings hurt. I wonder if there should be a different word for it than "volunteer", because the connotation of that word is that showing up and wanting to be helpful is enough.
SCOTUS rules that states may require online retailers to collect sales taxes
God school administrators are some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met. Like legit malicious, petty and straight up terrible people.
Software engineers and entrepreneurs are extremely clever, numerous solutions will arise to integrate with all of the major ecommerce platforms to automate this. This won't be much of a burden on business. As long as regulations are clearly defined (unlike GDPR) the industry will deal. Uncertainty is always the biggest risk.
Show HN: Facebook post preview with React and AWS lambda
>In Colorado you're already asked when filing state taxes what the value of the goods you bought online that haven't been taxed yet

Many states do this. I imagine that relatively few individuals (as opposed to businesses) actually comply.
> Intel is in serious trouble right now.

The whole semiconductor industry is in trouble right now, though few seem to feel the weight of the issue.

We are looking at just a couple process nodes at best before we reach the end of the road for silicon lithography. Sure, there will be further tweaks on existing techniques which will squeeze out small improvements in power, performance and density.

But long gone are the days when we saw steady improvements in circuit density and simultaneously speed and simultaneously cost.

When this knowledge finally sinks in with the investment community, it will call into question the valuation of the entire computer industry. We're already seeing that in the desktop space. I could replace my 6-year old Intel i7-3770 desktop with 32GB of RAM, but what's out there that's significantly better at a reasonable cost? Well, a used Xeon workstation maybe, but that's about it.

That should be a big red flag to the investment community, but for reasons I don't understand, people don't seem to care yet.
I have a better one :)

"You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing" - stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-breakthrough-disregard-others/
Exploring Church Numerals with Python
A number of these exist. Where I used to work we used Avalara.
Telling people not to form personal relationships among the group that they spend most of their waking life with has a long history of failure.

That doesn't mean not to say it, but don't be surprised when it happens anyway. Sometimes people don't make the "rational" decision, or don't value their job enough to put the workplace's priorities above their own.
Indeed, I'd be interested to know the groups with least diversity also.