skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Two-hundred-and-forty staff at Perpetual Guardian, a company which manages trusts, wills and estate planning, trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five.

Similar trails were conducted in the eldercare in Sweden or Finland, I have forgot exactly where. The conclusion was that a shorter work week meant that less work got done, resulting in worse service for the citizens. Which seems intuitive. This exercise can't be replicated in other sectors, like construction, teaching, social work or garbage collection, without resulting in worse service or product.

However I do believe that there vast amount of worthless work being done. If you ever worked at a large cooperation you properly shuck your head on multiple occasions when reports, evaluations, surveys and such were being carried out involving multiple departments and requiring multiple approvals only to end unused in the trashcan. I have heard a number as high as 40% of work being done is essentially worthless, it serves no meaningful purpose and the people who made it could as well go home. Perhaps the example in the article is exactly this, the company were simply doing too much worthless work and the real success is realising this, stopping the madness and branding it as a success.
Sell reviews, more than likely. A review left by a seasoned account with an established and long purchase history appears far more legitimate than from an obvious shill account, and is correspondingly more valuable.

The same sort of incentive can be found in a lot of places. There's a pretty niche but healthy market for aged companies, for example. So rather than winding down and dissolving your entity, you can make a few bucks by selling it. And rather than making a new company, you would just buy one of those dormant entities. With multiple incentives, one of the primary being that the established entity will have an aged enough paper trail to pass a lot of fraud checks and credit opportunities that a new entity couldn't.
Very impressed with some of Voyage's recent hires. A question for @olivercameron,

What makes Voyage different? From what I understand, you pick canonical routes inside private communities. Let's assume demand on these routes are high enough, and there are enough private communities to make a significant market. What prevents Google from coming in and mapping the area in a week and run you out of business? Let's say, hypothetically, I'm a self driving car engineer, why would I pick Voyage over other big players who have a lot more capital and much bigger team with a lot more people like Drew Gray?
I remember my worst bout with depression, it was a downward spiral.

Work and school had me indoors 60+ hours a week, so lots of stress and no Vitamin D.

I had little to no time for cooking, so I ate junk processed fast food for most meals.

All of these things left me so drained that I stopped exercising and didn't have the energy to go to social events. I stopped hanging out with my best friends.

What little time and energy I had left was spent laying on the couch indoors on my phone obsessing over the news (which of course is overtly negative and divisive) and arguing politics on social media.

Anti-depressant drugs provided marginal relief from a complete breakdown but it wasn't until I started "working to live", getting outdoors, eating healthy, exercising frequently, meditating (when needed), quit watching the news and deleted my social media accounts that my mental health returned.

There are a handful of simple things that human beings require for adequate mental health or "chemical balance", and yet there are massive societal pressures and trillions of dollars being spent sabotaging those basic human needs. Unfortunately it's much easier to pop a pill than to confront such difficulties.
A lot of stores have that model- effectively putting online in competition with brick and mortar. I heard the founder of Staples (Stemberg) speak to this early in e-retail. Somebody asked how they were handling the upcoming online pressure, and he said they made it a separate unit with their own strategies, etc.
TallyGo employee here. We have free map impressions for customers of our navigation SDK.
They don’t see it as devaluing — the people who buy the cheapest thing have very little loyalty, and everyone else isn’t buying the cheap, adware-subsidized models anyway.

This explains the second part: it’s less that Apple charges a premium than that they don’t enter low-end segments. If you compare them to equivalent quality PCs (Surface, Signature edition, etc.) there’s not much of a difference.

Most business buyers understand this so I think the managers making those calls think of the consumer and business lines as almost separate brands, with the latter being both more profitable and longer term, and thus less likely to get nickel and dimed.
Interesting. I've had problems with all of the carriers (and some that are no longer around), but for the most part I'd be willing to "forgive" Amazon for the transgressions of a third party that's going to screw everyone equally. I've less sympathy for Amazon's own logistics company though.

Timing of residential deliveries are pretty unpredictable with FedEx and UPS in my experience. One of the nice things about having a PO box is that packages are available for retrieval by 10 AM.
This price change doesn't make any sense to me or the people where I work, unless they just want people to stop using Google Maps on other sites.

You increase prices over an order of magnitude. You give people warning. You give people credits to cover a few more months without paying extra.

What is the end game. If you just want extra revenue, why are you giving them the grace period to switch? Why are you giving service credits to give people another couple months to switch?

So if they want people to stop using Google Maps (businesses, not consumers), WHY do they want reduced use? Is there an outside source changing pricing or licensing? I don't think so, I think Google owns the data.
I agree with this sentiment but it is a bit of a double edged sword for Python professionally. There is some really good Python code out there but there is also a lot of bad stuff too. I know this can be said for every language but I think I have seen it most in languages like JS and Python because of the ease of access.
Yes, that's the common refrain - that the vaccine itself serves as that same stressor - and of course that is true, on the date that you take the vaccine.

But from then on, while you certainly maintain information from the vaccine in your immune system, you aren't ramping up the actual mechanisms of your immune system like you do when you actually experience influenza.

Think of the temperature raise, the white blood cell production, possible gastro-intestinal reactions - these are all bodily systems being ramped up to a level of performance they don't typically see.

My thought is that if I "successfully" avoid the flu for, say, the next 40 years, those bodily systems will not be as robust - even if I maintain the informational content of the vaccine itself.

Please, please, do not confuse this or lump this in with kooky anti-science, vaccine opponents. I'm just thinking out loud about how stressors on body systems work - which is what my parent was discussing.
Hey, author here :) I am curious about your experiences using/learning React. Are there any other JavaScript topics which are important when starting out with React? Would be great hearing your opinion!
In case anyone else was confused by the literary reference, "one with Nineveh and Tyre" is from Kipling's "Recessional":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_(poem)

Which, I think, is the poem that made "lest we forget" a well-known phrase (though the original is from the Bible).

Nineveh (now Mosul, Iraq) and Tyre (in Lebanon) were great cities of their time, but now mostly known for their ruins. In Britain, they're commonly used as symbols of foregone empires.
A Javascript array comprehension [0] in theory is similar to a Python list comprehension [1]. However, the slight difference in syntax makes Python dramatically easier to read and write. Javascript dropped the feature. Pythonistas use it often.

Many programmers, even Python core devs, don't understand what makes one syntax more readable than another.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#list-...
I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that'd be pretty illegal.

This is what drug dealers do.

It was also the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.
It's probably not a full 20% loss, but I think your point still stands. To expand a bit:

It seems to me that the only way they could work a day less and not affect the companies productivity is if those employees did nothing during that day anyway. Say that in a work week an employee produced 100 units of work (feel free to substitute this with your favorite productivity microbenchmark). Thus, with the 5 day work-week each day the employee must produce around 20 units of work. Say you reduce that to 4 days, so now each day the worker must produce 25 units of work to be as productive. It follows that in order to work one less day per week the worker must work 25% more per day or overall productivity will suffer.

Imagine that your company implements something like this, suddenly per-day expectations go way up. Can you complete that meeting at 125% speed? Will your builds finish 25% faster? Can you increase your typing speed by 25%? Can you dig that ditch in 3 hours instead of 4? Can you clear tables 25% faster? I don't think anyone wants the consequences of this.

The only way I can remotely see this working out is for the employers of salaried info-workers in high profit-margin industries. For someone employed in a manual or skilled labor position it may be impossible or outright dangerous to attempt to complete tasks at 125% speed. I could however see this being a neat benefit that employers like the Silicon Valley types offer to outbid the competition, but I don't think this is practical for the economy in general.
British broadband speed map
This exists for Amazon products: camelcamelcamel.com
I'm really suprised the article didn't mention anything about Tizen. For Google, Tizen looks like a big issue. At some point in the future, their biggest hardware seller, Samsung, will start switching all of their devices to running on Tizen and other partners in the Tizen Association (from wikipedia) are Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, KT, NEC Casio, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, SK Telecom, Sprint. Google's going to have to get very aggressive with Fuchsia to compete with Tizen.
camelcamelcamel (.com)
"Facebook will continue to offer a platform to Holocaust deniers, Infowars, and other publishers of hoaxes on the assumption that they are sincere in their beliefs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said."

Isn't this analogous to how internet service providers, water companies and electric companies operate? If there is an organization which is operating lawfully why should we shun them, unless there are special circumstances?

Or should we ask the domain registrar of infowars.com to shut down their site and revoke their HTTPS certificate?
When you use iPython you can just drop into the context of the error with %debug after it occurred, and then print the line there. No need for the bleeding scope on the language level.
Java, C# and modern PHP have a very similar style that's not at all universal. If you're used to those, Python is odd, but it can get a lot weirder. At least Python has classes.

__init__ is called that because it initializes the object. It could have been called "__construct__", but I think "__init__" is a lot clearer about what it actually does - the object is already created when it enters __init__, __init__ just prepares it.

Calling it "self" instead of "this" is super traditional. Smalltalk did it.

The __name__ == '__main__' pattern is ugly, and I'm not a huge fan of it. You don't always need it, it's just a guard to let you tell whether a script is run directly or imported as a module. The key is that Python only has runtime. A function declaration or class declaration is a fancy variable assignment. The content of the file is executed sequentially.

Python is not especially weird, but it is different from what you're used to. Wrapping your head around it takes a while, like with all languages, but things start to click eventually.

It helps to experiment. The REPL is great for that. If you don't understand why something is the way it is, mess with it until you think you understand its behavior, then mess with it some more.
Who calls evolutionary algorithms new? This title could have been written in 1994 if they had just used the term ANN instead of deep-learning.

People were writing books about this way back then.
That result should be a ratio, surely
No one has absolute control, but it can certainly be nudged in certain directions if the will is there and the population is relatively unified, something I don't foresee happening in the West for a very long time.
Can confirm, in Germany, where Android is >75%, everybody uses WhatsApp (iOS users, too).
Any such middlemen would certainly be breaking the terms of their contract with google, and possibly copyright law.

If they were willing and able to do so, they could already make a fortune by reselling Google Maps data.

Since that does not happen, I have doubts regarding your scenario.
Because UdSSR is apparently the german Acronym. I did not think of that before..
CorelDRAW 2018 v20.1.0.708 Full Türkçe ve Diğer Diller #ücretsizindir
Interesting, I don't discount your experience, but with PayPal/eBay sides with the buyer, case closed. Their customer support to a seller might as out right have "fuck off" in their script.
> Not all of those are contradictory. For example, Python mostly stays away from cryptic syntax and implicit behavior, making it verbose, but it finds powerful ways to express common patterns, making it concise.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree with this opinion. Python code is typically nearly as much as a slog as Go code, but adopts all the brutally hard parts of the common lisp's functional world by only exposing wrap-primitives.

> JavaScript's design had much less impact on its success than Python's design did on Python's success. It was doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, and how it did that wasn't all that important - once it turned into a web standard it wasn't going away.

The Python community would have us believe this. I think it's a profoundly biased and one-sided reading of the history that paints a bullseye around the target. Python's primary innovation is a community that doesn't embrace differences and growth, but rather hates and hazes it. And when change finally does happen, it happens in the way most likely to cause everyone heartache, as if to fulfill the prophecy the community made.
Even IoT sensors are easier to program with micropython.

What I find worrying is the the language is changing to suit those people, e.g. type hints, rather than teaching them learning to use the language. You don't complain you can't use a hammer as a screw driver, you just don't use a hammer.
Who said Fuchsia was some bogus project and a waste of talent and resources? My original comment was that Google was willing to let its enginners work on duplicate project so they remain at Google instead of leaving to work elsewhere. If Fuchsia turns out great, that will be a win for Google. It's not like these enginneers are just being paid to kill time.

Google bought Android, then also created Chrome OS and is now making a tthird OS named Fuchsia.

They had Gchat that they scrapped for Hangouts, which they pivoted into a business chat (Meet), but the Hangouts client is still available for the general public. They also made Allo, which eventually went nowhere, so now they're pushing for the adoption of RCS (Android Messages).

Gchat, Hangouts, Meet, Allo, RCS. That's 5 messaging apps right there.
Coordinated human rights movements have made major improvements to the human condition. That's of course not to say they are easy or always successful, quite the contrary.

The Enlightenment/democracy, abolition of slavery, civil rights movements, unions/labor rights movements are all examples of humans consciously improving their societies.
> Wave and Hello.com each had over 50 engineers, and Andy Rubin spent several hundred million (perhaps billions) on robotics acquisitions, all for projects that ended up getting canceled.

And they all got canceled once their business case became void.

None of these were bogus projects. They all initially had a business case, and were run by engineers who proved themselves before. When that business case fail to pan out - they were canceled.

> At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter.

Maybe to you as an employee. Not to Google as a business, nor its shareholders.

If I'm a Google shareholder, and you're wasting hundreds of millions of dollars of my money with nothing to show for it but some vague fears that "my engineers will go to competitors", then I'm going to be unhappy. Beyond a certain point, you're opening yourself up to lawsuits and even criminal charges (Google is a public company).

All of your examples are projects that were interesting and had some passionate senior engineers pushing them forward, but also had a business case. When the business case went bust, so did the project.

To support OP's assertion that Fuchsia is just a retention project with no future, you'd have to show a project of its size (or any size, really) run for the sole purpose of retention with no plausible business case.

I don't think such a thing exists, and it's not in any of your examples.

I have some personal experience with Wave. It had a plausible business case and Google was promoting it heavily. It wasn't bogus. I'm sure the same is true for the others.
Haha, or when they tell me the data will be kept confidential. I can't help but laugh at that.
I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources. Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive.

I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04... (yes they are for Ubuntu but you'll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don't really need it, I recommend trying it to understand how it works; it has some very intuitive ideas.

Beyond the tile server I am also proposing GeoServer (http://geoserver.org) for hosting the geo points on the maps (it can integrate with PostGIS and various other datasources and output the geo points in various different formats). You can then use Leaflet (https://leafletjs.com) to actually display the map and points!
Depends on what you value. I value fun driving over nice finishes, so I'd pick the Model 3.
Ask HN: How to cope with professional anxiety/self-confidence in tech?
First of all, my apologies for the possibly ambigous title. I do not know the exact terms to describe my issue, so I'll try my best to outline it.

I would describe my problem as a combination of lack of self-confidence, self-discipline and anxiety, mostly related to the tech field (I'm a full stack developer with 4 years of experience).

The thing is, even though I proved myself greatly at my current job (and previous ones), and my colleagues think I'm skilled, my feelings are the contrary because:

1. Whatever I learn, I forget rather quickly. I simply read and code, but this is not enough to 'learn', I know. However, there is too much stuff to learn, and I feel partly overwhelmed by this fact. This is a problem because the tech field requires an approach to constant learning.

2. Due to the feeling of being stuck in terms of knowledge, I believe to be stucked professionally, and to be unsuitable for more-skilled jobs. Recruiters contact me with nice offers, but my feeling is that I would be rejected.

3. Additionally, I am lost in terms of career path development. I haven't found a career path I would firmly pursue (yet) and feel that the clock is ticking, making me nervous.

4. As a result, I feel bad and lack self-confidence. I consider myself NOT ready to start a side-project (as means to improve my tech skills), because it overwhelms me due to the large number of considerations (for a web app: setup, choosing libraries/services/frameworks, good SEO, best coding practices...) and its complexity. Therefore I struggle and potentially leave the project aside.

Have you ever felt like this, completely or partially? If so, how did you cope with these feelings?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Alcohol: 2 drinks/wk
Coffee: 20-ish cups a day.
The folksy comparison in the article is misleading, or just wrong. The probe is going closer than they imply.

> If Earth was at one end of a yard-stick and the Sun on the other, Parker Solar Probe will make it to within four inches of the solar surface

Perhaps they meant 4 cm.
A 20x jump on the monthly charge, especially in lower margin business, will hurt whichever way you look at it, IMHO.
Why would you want to actually enforce privacy? That makes it harder for the user to patch. Better to provide a mild discouragement via "_name".
> Isn't this analogous to how internet service providers, water companies and electric companies operate?

If you mean, as a neutral common carrier (POTS telephone service in the US is a better example), then, no: Facebook is actively fighting certain legal political content because it is judged by FB to be harmful (there was a fairly active thread on HN on this in the last couple of days.) It's just decided that the listed content doesn't meet the criteria for what is being targeted.
Your working hours may be fluid, but the workload can't be arbitrary; when you say "as long as shit gets done", someone must have an idea of how much shit you should be able to get done in a regular week. So it's just a case of reducing that expectation by 20%.
The article is positing a how and why, not merely pointing out the fact. The stealth I guess being that the how/why may be different then some may have thought.
I've been here for 8, my (totally anecdotal) observation is that a lot of the homelessness + drug use has moved up market from the mid market/tenderloin area towards duboce triangle and the castro making it more noticeable/visible. I wouldn't be surprised if the absolute numbers increased too but it seems like a lot of the development/companies that moved into the mid market area may have led to an increase in police enforcement that has led to a dispersion.
To me, Python has represented the nice friendly face one can put on the mean nasty stuff written in C++
> reliable BMW

That's a tall order.
Zuckerberg, Musk and Trump use 'clarifications' to confuse us
How does Mapbox stack up against what you've built? Does Mapbox provide any advantages or is are the two not very comparable? How difficult would it be to spin up a Mapbox competitor?
Call the executive office instead. I had to do that when they tried to charge an early termination fee a couple of years after the contract expired and while guy on the phone was quickly fixing that he casually mentioned that when the customer service rep seems like they don’t understand it’s usually that they aren’t allowed to do something AND can’t tell you this.

It sounded like the worst job in the world and it was unnerving how casually he described it as the natural order of things.