skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Driving a taxi is a last-resort job. It may flatter people with safer jobs to attribute racism to taxi drivers, but instead they should try to understand their decision-making.

From a 1997 column by black economist Thomas Sowell:

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0324/5906052a/
Trading blood for pizza
"The city of San Francisco passed a law making it illegal to refuse to make deliveries in high-crime neighborhoods. It all started when someone wanted to order a pizza and the company said that it did not deliver in that part of town. This is not uncommon in other cities or for deliveries of other things besides pizza.

Back during the 1991 Gulf War, those opposed to sending American troops to the Middle East called our military action "trading blood for oil." But none of those people seems to have protested the San Francisco law as trading blood for pizza. ;

Since most people in high-crime neighborhoods are not criminals, it is of course unjust in some cosmic sense that they should be deprived of things that other law-abiding people have available to them. But vandals, hoodlums and murderers are expensive luxuries for their neighbors in many ways, including higher insurance rates, lower property values and fewer businesses to provide either services or jobs.

These costs are undeniable. The question is: Who should pay these costs? Should it be third parties, such as drivers delivering pizza, who might have to pay with their lives?"
I've been debugging a GIS application lately. We have a remote customer & a corporate connection to them that has a lot of latency. Since most GIS sites work by sending hundreds of square map tile images, there ends up being a lot of requests, especially for maps with many layers.

As helpful as decreasing image size was, switching to HTTP/2 was even better. Highly recommend giving HTTP/2 a try if your dealing with a lot of file requests & latency. A small test of 150 images went from 6 seconds down to 1 second in our tests.
"Sucks if you bet on black" - buying shares hoping for an earnings surprise to pocket some free gains is the middle class version of having a good feeling about a horse.
The only marketing I've seen for it was the tape on my packages the last few weeks.
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. It's actually a completely different stack/app, and has a lot of focus on making the real-time collab, intelligent inking (shape & table recognition) and canvas much richer (sticky notes, alt-text for accessibility, Bing image search with ink, GDPR compliant, multi-touch ruler for straight lines, rainbow/galaxy ink for pure fun during boring meetings...)
Nice idea but makes no allowance for recent ideas being poorer than earlier ideas or that the good and bad might run in phases. If I look in the IoT niche I might easily conclude that terrible ideas and trends are the only ones on offer.

Choosing which are aging changing one's perspective and which a good ideas changed for the worse for change's sake is a far more difficult problem.
I actually bought it quite sometime ago, but that means I have a lot of shares, and the more shares you have the more small movements in price start to add up to real money.

Right now I’m down several thousands of dollars on NFLX, which could have easily been a few international vacations. It’s not the first time or last time stuff like this happens, but everything was rallying so nicely the past few days it’s a shame to see that get back tracked. And of course, other tech stocks are down with it which also adds to the pain.
Where do you think the trillions come from!
Not only does this statement not make any clear sense (why does English speaking #s affect price of the service?) but India has the second largest English speaking population in the world.
The Steel plant I work at uses SAP, though personally I don't touch it and only know vague details about it.

I know all non-routine maintenance, mandatory inspections, contractors and warehouse supplies etc is booked in it. Stuff like fire extinguishers, elevator mechanic call outs for breakdowns, replacement hydraulic fluid stuff like that is done via SAP. I think even general 'consumables' stuff like toner for printers in offices / control rooms, fluorescent light tube replacement etc are managed by it.

When you think about it these systems are horrendously complicated.
Technology is a much cheaper and faster industry to produce. Software has no physical components and is therefore free, compared to plumbing which needs piping. Where am I going with this? They couldn't afford to replace piping every 5 years so they needed to find ways of making them timeless.
As much as I agree, let’s obviously not judge people based on accents, I find this a bit ridiculous. I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the idea of visiting let’s say France, completely butchering pronunciations, and then claiming that anybody who corrects me just has a different accent. There’s obviously more or less correct ways to speak a language...
Opening a position on the day of the earnings announcement is generally a bad idea regardless of whether you’re right or wrong about the direction. Volatility is effectively priced in at that point.
Indeed; if everything is special/important/priority/good, then nothing is special/important/priority/good. Words have meaning dually by the set of things they name and the set of things they don't.
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Would <3 to know how you'd want to use Whiteboard in VR...tell me more?
You can't predict the market but I think they still have some growth ahead of them and that their shares will still rise. They won't rally and grow as much as they have forever but I don't think the market has softened up for them yet. I'm going to buy while they are a little down.
What's the lower bound for their share price before they have to change how they operate the business or suffer a penalty to net revenue? Or, if the stock market goes offline for 365 days, would any particular harm come to them at all?
Another anecdote: I’d have cancelled Netflix a while ago if my family wasn’t using it. Their UX has been on a steady decline for me:

- Audio previews make it so I never want to browse for what to watch next. I hate having to fumble with my tv/home theatre remote because of this.

- If you leave it hanging, the previews count towards a watch! Wow. God help you if you wanna make some popcorn.

- Their sorts are always shuffled around, pushing whatever content is on their agenda.

- Im bilingual, and I can’t belive there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows. I can’t watch a show like Narcos without having subs for either English or Spanish. This might sound nit picky, but bilinguals aren’t exactly edge cases, either (SV is full of bilinguals!)

I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them. But damn it is infuriating. Crazy that my favorite netflix client is the one Apple designed for them in the older Apple TVs
China expands surveillance of sewage to police illegal drug use
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Very curious to learn more. Any particular use cases / dashboards that immediately come to mind?
I'm in Asia and always thought I'd make a great on call person for those of you who haven't jumped ship. I should apply somewhere.
Like others say, pick your battles. The key to being productive is knowing what decisions you have to make, and what decisions you can delegate. The thing with delegation is, it's not micro-management. The people you delegate to are not going to do things exactly as you would. If you can't accept that, don't delegate, and suffer the productivity loss.

For example, say you're a software engineer that really wants to run your own servers, but don't personally want to maintain that infrastructure, and the person/team you delegate to wants to run everything in the cloud. You don't need to step in and say "that's terrible, I hate you, do it my way." What you need to do is make sure your needs are taken care of by the team with the responsibility for building and maintaining the production environment; you need to be able to connect the special FPGA you developed, you need to be able to deploy a release within 30 seconds of checking the code in, etc. If they take care of your needs, you shouldn't care how it's implemented.

On the other hand, you can be in a position of power and decide "the person I've delegated to has done it completely wrong, and we will be out of business in 30 days if they continue." In that case, you just shut it down with no reason. The team that you did that to is not going to be pleased; half of them will leave your company, the other half will be sad and do nothing for 12 months... but that's the cost of micromanagement.

As for open offices, they're cheap. If you don't like them, the way you talk someone out of them is to suggest a cheaper alternative. Good luck. Your other option is to accept less salary -- that $5000 a year they gave you to outbid their competitor came directly out of the budget for walls around your desk. As engineers, we certainly want to be productive, but ultimately the benefit is not tangible enough. It's quite likely that we would use all the extra productivity to make a once-a-month process 3x faster, which provides no benefit to anyone except our once-a-month selves. The company does not care. People do _enough_ work in cheap offices to make the company money, and that is really all they need. You doing more work would probably be great, but that's a difficult-to-see benefit and the cost of more real estate is an easy-to-see cost center. Nobody thinks open offices are good for productivity, morale, or whatever... they're cheap. Any argument against them must be an easy-to-see monetary argument, or you'll never win the argument. (Compare Joel Spolsky's company to the king of open offices, Google. Google makes more money per engineer. Now that's probably because they picked a better industry, but if giving people their own offices is worth the huge financial hit... they should be doing better than someone. But they're not, they're the same. That's why the "better productivity" argument is not going to get you a private office.)

You can always start your own company predicated on giving every employee a giant office. If you do well, I'll join you! But I do require a salary increase as well ;)
Same. I nearly cancelled when they got rid of Chuck. Amazon Prime picked it up shortly afterwards and lately most of what we watch is on Amazon.
> The hardware for compiling a recipe is way too imprecise for the micro adjustments a version control system would be useful for.

Not a bad point, I didn't think about it like that. However, I think this would be more useful to the people who are competent enough to implement nuanced recipes. Small changes in the recipe can lead to large changes in the food, much larger than the error between competent cooks. What if you have different tastes than the original recipe, and I like your taste? I'd wanna know about your changes, especially if I had the skills to implement them and I had a passion for cooking.

Plus, Generations have already been iterating and verbally passing down recipes for thousands of years. Most of that history is gone, and all we have is a thin slice which is what we know today. You only stand to gain by using version control for recipes.

But sure, Github probably won't explode as the go-to recipe database, because the intersection of git users and competent cooks is small compared the amount of cooks.

> It's also just a cheap post. What, now we can upload otherwise unnoteworthy content to github, and suddenly we're on the front page of HN?

This is not too important to me. Hey, we're all here talking about the post, so maybe it is noteworthy.
I think this is an age thing. For that group of people that have not known life without the internet, having a social life not attached to being online seems unfathomable. For those of us old farts that had a life before the internet, having a social life without the facebook is just another day. For those that think not having social media is the end of the world, I'd suggest you're just not very imaginative.
Urdu column and news
How many schools allow you to recontinue your education again if you drop out to start a company but it fails?

Seems like if I had this option I would have dropped out at least once.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-am...
Audio previews! Holy shit! Terrible experience. And auto-play for episodes. I know it gets people hooked to watch, but still annoying.

There are so few configurable items in their Netflix menu.
I think it is criminal to put 4-year-old kids in school for 27.5 hours a week. It has to cut into useful skill-development time of playing.
I once owned an EAV DB for storing small config values. Someone wrote a great wrapper around it that made it seem like a proper DB with many tables. Since it was for storing configs this library cached the whole thing in memory on startup. Zoom to 5 years later, we have 10+ settings for every customer in this store, and one day all our hosts keep failing over. As it turns out that small table for configs was north of 5 gigs and destroying our heap.
Huh, thank you for explaining that. Prior to this I had only recognized the phrase "Are you taking the piss?" from watching Misfits, and from that context had always assumed it meant "are you out of your mind?". Seems more like "Are you screwing with me?" or "are you serious?" would be the more accurate meaning given this definition.
I think electrics will eventually be cheaper than gas (and I'm looking forward to that day), but right now production is bottle-necked on battery supply. So, manufacturers can sell cars for any price they like because electric cars are relatively rare. It won't last forever, but it's a nice position to be in for the companies that have a steady, reliable source for battery cells.
That’s Numberwangcoin! [pdf]
> “Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread

I think it is clear with this "flatbread" that we are seeing evidence for proto-pizza delivery. They may yet turn up what amount to coupons, perhaps as notches on sticks, or perhaps a receipt or change.
Designing a Good DSL
I do think they will grow but now I’m planning when my actual exit will be. I think I’ll give it another year or two before pulling out and realizing the gains.
I’ve started and sold multiple B2B startups (and started 1 B2C as well as observing or consulting for a few others), and I agree with Justin’s thesis and most of his points.

Other than for content, getting individuals to spend their own money - even for something they seem to and claim to value - is incredibly difficult. Other revenue sources run into the issues he lists.
From the point of political economics, charging interest is not necessarily a given. Economies exist where interest is prohibited.
Chemical reactions are a subset of atomic transmutation. Arbitrary atomic transmutation is likely a superset of all possible atomic transmutations

Categories. It's all categories.
It's not just cyclists: https://youtu.be/BpRfUh1Dzlw
You're thinking of options, not stock. Stock price itself can't imply volatility, it can only reflect market expectations of earnings.
Seriously, the stock plunged to where it was all of about 8 weeks ago.
> Am I the only that read this and thought, “or you can do what people have been doing for thousands of years and just have a fucking conversation with your mother every once in a while.”

Yes, but it's also a Twilio content marketing piece, do take it for what it's worth in that context. This crowd might create a Rube Goldberg machine to provide location status updates to loved ones, everyone else is going to use Find My Friends, an app, social media, or plain ol talking to them.
Slackware and 3.5 inch disks for me too. If I remember correctly, I was going to install SLS Linux but this "Slackware" thing was the new hotness. Time flies having fun I guess. Still running Linux on my workstation.
I have no use for it. I use my broswer's native bookmarks sync functionality.
I'd add to this their removal of star ranking and that percentage system. It's so geared to what they want to promote vs what is good TV.
Someone probably sent their toddler to go rub grain between two rocks to keep the toddler out of their hair while they butchered a goat or something.
In addition to the shit that is not politically correct to say, Amazon relies heavily on interns for production code and ops. Bezos has this view that the unskilled can get him 80% of what he wants and then a few top people can smooth out the rest. In reality the few top people never even come in contact with the kid that is trying to keep amazon.com running overnight. Successive waves of interns and SDE 1's fuck up the same shit over and over. Bezos is stupidly applying this same strategy at his space company.
Would have been well retconned as as far as we know today
Also known as "manually pumping the message loop". I'm almost certain that that program was handling communications events on the same thread as the message pump, and only relying on a very slow timer to move them through. There was probably plenty of such badly-written software back then, because 16-bit Windows was cooperatively multitasked and had no concept of threads.

Related article and discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957

http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.mic...
Ansibles allow violating causality
By SEO content are you talking about the blogs where they put like a multi page story about how amazing the recipe is, and what their family thinks of it, and that time they went to a little restaurant in a foreign country and had something like X, and then at the very end a barebones recipe copied out of allrecipes or some other site? I've noticed those dominate in the past few years
Actually, Apple does have LTE modems. It's just that they insist on referring to them as iPhones or iPads.
I believe their net revenue was still +40%. I think a slowing in subscriber growth could prove to be temporary.

In general, they'd have to lose shareholder/board confidence in company direction, which won't happen anytime soon.
Where I think you're wrong is that you seem to assume there's a path to arbitrary transmutation. It may not be possible, and I would argue, almost certainly isn't.
it's all fun until somebody says the wrong thing to the wrong person and HR gets involved and hashtags go viral and then there's a huge blow up about why all of this behavior was tolerated for so long and who was responsible for tolerating it.
I used Dropbox from 2009 through last month or so. Switched over to Syncthing. I was a little bit worried about stability but soon after I sampled it I felt convinced that it was the right move. I was previously using Dropbox as a kind of makeshift backup as well as a sync tool, but now I have a desktop again and run automated backups on that using Backblaze, so I'm a little bit more in control over the data by doing my own syncing.
I've shared a lot of your issues with Netflix as well, and I don't think it's nitpicky to want to watch Narcos without any subtitles. I feel like especially for that show where it really tried to capture the feeling of Colombia watching it and having to read half dialogue takes away from my enjoyment.
Kohl’s is a puzzling place to me. Bizarre coupons, a weird mix of products and wacky pricing. People actually go with their coupon to get another coupon, valid two weeks in the future when the prices are higher.
Perhaps the assumption that bread is a product of agriculture is the wrong way around? If bread was already being consumed then it would make sense to want a more centralized and reliable source of grain.
With Netflix, there doesn’t seem to be any amount of seeing something and not clicking on it that ever gets the system to stop showing it to me.

Every time I log in, there’s a big wall of 20 posters I’ve seen a thousand times and never clicked on once and have zero interest in.

And the whole user experience seems about finding my way around that wall.

I can find stuff I’m interested in, but the platform never surfaces it for me. I always have to dig.

I always use the feedback system, too.

Netflix always brags about paying mid-six in pure salary and hiring top of market. Their internal presentations on content discovery and demography are something people tell stories of like they glimpsed a magical relic or something.

As a user I honestly cannot fathom where all that money and research could possibly be going.

Maybe my account is broken or something.
When I downloaded it, painfully over a 57.6k modem using zmodem, I remember all the notes about slack and the church of Bob. At the time, 1993 or so, there was no Wikipedia, so it was a bit hard for a naive high school kid to figure out that there was actually no religious connotation. I never did get the hang of slack or slackware, but it got me on the path to where I am.
It's not just what you make of it: a lot of your experience there is going to depend on your manager. I had three: the first was awesome, so he left for another company; the second was good, but he cared too much and went back to his old (non-management) position to feel fulfilled; the third was a sociopath and did really well, promoted to upper management and a subsidiary and out to greener pastures. Working for the sociopath was awful and got me to leave (where I'd planned on a long career). And no, there was no escape from him except leaving Amazon: he sunk my performance reviews when I asked to leave to go to another team 'cause I told him I didn't think I was a good fit where I was.

There are a lot of amazing and smart people, like you said, but there is also a lot of stress, heartache, and trouble if you don't keep your ear to the ground and build a strong network of people to give you an early warning. Don't keep your head down and concentrate on tech and building cool stuff: Amazon can be way too political for pure techies to thrive without strong protection from management.
That's a great article, for sure. But back in the day, it's arguable that beer was mainly for grain preservation. It's very hard to get wasted on low-EtOH beer. Which is what early beers would have been.
Depends on the orbit it's in. If it's high enough, it will last long past your death. Whether it keeps working that long, probably not. Radiation damage accumulates reasonably rapidly and most cubesats don't live more than a few years, if that.
I have twitch in background about anytime BUT when I'm playing a game
I'm betting Disney messes it up. They will be too married to legacy revenue streams in DVD + Cable TV to really make their service worthwhile and eat into Netflix's market share with an incredible deal for consumers.
(◔_◔)
If you can take your vested equity with you, and won't see your accounts declining month to month from habituation to a higher income, then sure. Otherwise it sounds like too unfavorable a trade.
Consumerism at its best... Probably for the better than Amazon Prime is down (at least for me - I'll speak for myself).

Honestly, my life got better when I stopped getting packages to my door. Only buy the most essential things you need - sell the stuff you don't. Better to live an uncluttered life without "things"...