skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That Fed announcement was an Obama era directive and was reversed by Jeff Sessions in 2017 [1]. 8.5% is not a small number and the conflict of interest is untenable as the scandals have shown.

That this could be reversed inspite of known abuses [2] and serious problems [3] with the private prison system is extremely troubling. Private prison operators are one of the largest lobbying groups and spend more than $45 million a year on lobbying. [4]

There have been a series of serious scandals with private prisons [5], judges [6] and corruption [7] with people sent to prison simply to pad numbers in private prisons. It's unteneble for a civilized society that believes in rule of law to allow justice to be vulgarized in this manner and allow a system known to be corrupt to stand.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justi...

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...

[3] http://time.com/5013760/american-private-prisons-donald-trum...

[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-yankovich/be-careful-pr...

[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2011/08/12/pennsylv...

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

[7] https://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/judge-who-accepted-private...
Conflicting data [1]

[1] - https://examine.com/supplements/fish-oil/
It can go even further than that: In some areas, the courts can require you to use a bondsman. You simply cannot pay it yourself. You either pay the bondsman or you sit in jail. There is no other choice.
Ethical Hacking Certifications: PenTest+ vs. CEH
Is there any reason NYC couldn’t implement progressive congestion pricing? Payment is automated and could be tied to tax returns.
It looks like the city snuck in a ride-sharing vehicles cap by pairing it with a pay floor for for-hire vehicle drivers.

"[Caption] Drivers of for-hire vehicles on Wednesday demonstrated in support of a cap on ride-hail vehicles outside City Hall."

Then the signs in the picture above the caption are all focused on the pay floor...

"VOTE yes to create a pay floor for FHV drivers"

The pay floor and the ride-sharing cap are very separate issues, but it seems like the city pulled a fast one by pairing their legislation.

With the L train shutting down for a year+, this could be disastrous for getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
Disclaimer: I'm the original author of the blog post. :-)

> In fact, S3's REST API requires callers to follow HTTP redirects...

Yes. Let's take the example of uploading 3 small files.

With S3, every upload call must start by hitting the same URL that is then redirected. To upload the same 3 small files in B2, it is a little different. For B2, one call is made to the "dispatch server" to ask for where there is spare space, then there is no redirect. The client must disconnect, and contact the final destination three times. So for this example, S3 would need to do 3 redirects (3 total network calls) and Backblaze B2 would do zero redirects but make 4 total network calls to upload three files. I hope that makes sense.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, and I freely admit S3 can be a little more intuitive. But it saves Backblaze money to not have such high loads and high uptime demand on the original URL.

> Again, this could be done directly with HTTP.

Yes I agree it could have been.

> There's no need to have a separate API call to get the "real" upload URL.

The "need" was to save money. See example above. Amazon S3 would require 3 redirects from the original URL, while Backblaze B2 chose a different tradeoff that is zero redirects and 4 total requests where 3 out of 4 requests were NOT redirected. The 3 out of 4 requests go to the final location DIRECTLY.

If you are only uploading one file, the Amazon S3 API is about as efficient as Backblaze and I agree with you. But if you upload 1 million files, the Backblaze B2 architecture is cheaper/simpler. But either way, it is the tradeoff we chose.

> as of August 2015, us-standard... has read-after-write consistency for new objects

TIL. We launched the B2 API before August of 2015, sorry if I propagated old info!
Are the bar charts generated with the pandas library? The ones in the report received by mail... Took a peek at the documentation but all I see is graphic based ones with plot functions.
Thanks
Games on Blockchain
Freedom is a double edge sword. Some people use their freedom to elevate themselves, others are free to fail. In the West we treat an disinclination to handle freedom responsibly as either a moral failing (the right) or reject the possibility that failing to handle freedom can have anything to do with one's character at all and thus inequality must be blamed on external forces (the left). The truth is it is not necessarily a moral failing to handle freedom irresponsibility and handling freedom irresponsibly very likely has a lot to do with someone's personality.
There's an excellent chrome extension called Skip Redirect that does this universally. Whitelisting is really simple too if it causes any problems. It decodes urls like "https://out.reddit.com/t3_747gsgju?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsitelin... and strips out the tracking strings and other nonsense and sends you straight to (in this example case) "https://sitelinked.tld/page.html"
Fish oil can cause internal bleeding: https://www.livestrong.com/article/88012-fish-oil-bleeding/
"It was the ability to, for the very first time, measure hormones down to the billionth of a gram. That’s like if you took a gram of salt and threw it into the ocean, and it had a powerful impact."

That's about 10 orders of magnitude out. Not as bad as the vacuum energy calculation, but still quite a wide miss.
The number of drivers finds equilibrium on its own. Too many drivers = too low wages, so people stop driving. Too few drivers = high wages/wait times, so more people become drivers.
I didn't do the math, but know people who did and got that the initial deposit is a real game changer.

Assuming we pay the same for mortgage and rent, who wouldn't want to pay rather mortgage?

But remember, to pay the same, there was a huge downpayment. If you were to invest that rationally, long term returns could be worth it, even while paying rent.

OTOH, rational investing (in a balanced fund portfolio) is hard, and mortgage forces you to save.

YMMV, do your math.
[citation needed] that congestion-pricing is regressive. I'd expect the exact opposite: those in NYC who take private cars, rather than public transit, are higher-income.

Everyone gets a benefit from the public roads even if they don't use them directly: they feed the high-value trips that make the businesses there possible. But there's still not enough road-capacity for everyone without value-destroying congestion: a massive toll paid by everyone in delays. So, more money should be raised to improve roads and alternatives. And, that money should be raised in a way that shifts those who are most-adaptable into alternatives, in proportion to the congestion they'd cause. Only congestion fees do that.
If the problem they are trying to solve is "too many vehicles" then we need a congestion tax. They should certainly not be limiting vehicles that are more likely to take multiple people with a Pool option.

If the problem they are trying to solve is "drivers aren't making enough" then they should impose a minimum wage on drivers or force an actual employee relationship.

If the problem they are trying to solve is a bail out of the failed and corrupt taxi medallion system, then maybe this will succeed. The real issue here is the cab drivers who are hurting because they provide an inferior service to a clientele who now have better options. I avoid cabs for all but the shortest trips because of the large percentage of bad driving experiences. Some solutions to improve yellow cabs like having a simple feedback mechanism for drivers could go a long way to leveling the playing field between Uber and Taxi.
Who are the cronies that are benefiting from the L-train shutdown?
(Josh, co-founder of Holloway here.)

There are a couple sides to this. No company should or will tell every financial detail to every candidate. On the other hand, if a company has given you an offer and really wants to hire you, yet is very evasive about all the info you need to evaluate your offer, it can be a warning sign; it's likely indicative of the level of transparency you'll get as an employee, too. The 409A is material to understand your stock options, so very fair to ask about before signing.

Also—we'd love more questions like this in the marginal notes in the Guide, so it improves iteratively! If you (or anyone else) wants early access to that feature shoot an e-mail to josh@holloway.com
> It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter.

In many ways, a congested city works like a income-adjusted congestion tax, where you pay with your time. Since the time of rich people is more valuable, the burden seems "fair". The only problem is that the time is wasted, no tax is collected.

Maybe we should accept that political reality and setup income adjusted congestion taxes, putting the revenue to work to ease congestion for everybody.

Another option is to disburse a limited, equal number of "tradable driving hours" to each citizen regardless of income. You now have a market that eficiently allocates the limited public resource, allowing poor or thrifty citizens to earn tax credits, while allowing rich drivers to pay a fixed rate for each driving hour exceeding their allocation.

It's good politics, bad economics - but still much better than wasting millions of man hours each day.
It's a new trend with millenials, "I have no clue but I'm gonna write about it". Mediocrity as a virtue.
AmEx sends notifications for any use of my card. It is really a great thing.
When well-defined rules include "content that the government wants to suppress because it criticized them" the rules provide censorship via moderation.

In this case, Facebook - presuming what they did was "follow the rules" - is following censorship rules.

So perhaps the thread should be about the US government forcing companies to censor free speech for them.
The problem is credentials. If you have a college degree in X, you can prove it to me. If you lived at home and took pre-programmed online courses, I need a way of determining whether you actually know what those courses should have taught you.

Of course, a college degree doesn't really tell me that, either. If you can solve this problem, you could make online education superior to college education (at least in terms of value to an employer).
> So far, the city has proposed more water taxis as the primary solution to handle rerouting the 300k daily riders.

I don't understand what your complaint is. Not every L train ride crosses the river (I'll concede at least half probably do, though). MTA is also adding supplemental bus and train service. Do you think they should instead allow ride share to fill the gap? If so, I have doubts the city's geometry (particularly on the Manhattan end) would permit enough cars on the streets to support 300k additional trips, especially since they are likely concentrated around morning/evening rush hours.
I didn't look closely enough, could it have been dog poop? People walking dogs often carry plastic bags, and I bet some of them dislike the scooters enough to vandalize them.
> seems pretty common to me.

> From my experience

> the general population.

I've already qualified my comment, and both of us were discussing personal experiences.

If you'd prefer to discuss the general population instead of trading personal experiences, here is some historical data from pew, as well as the most recent report from the BLS:

http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-20...

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf

This shows that my experience is closer to the general population than the experience I responded to. I'd venture a guess that the distribution of that ~62% isn't uniform across the country and is likely weighted by cost of living (which is likely why our experiences differ).
If we start to allow those who can't afford the congestion pricing to get a discount on congestion pricing, do we really have congestion pricing? Or just a new proportional-to-income "driving tax" in addition to state, county, and city taxes?
If society devolves into a tit-for-tat game of disenfranchising the "other team" we're in for a lot of trouble. And yes that includes shutting down your opponents on "private" platforms.
In NYC a tax would be wildly regressive and favor wealthy wall st users over all others.

EDIT: congestion tax = more expensive mobility (incl taxis and ride sharing) = less affordability

It's similar to local sales taxes: the 1% aren't affected by the cost of basic items, but the 99% are.
Launching the 2018 State of Rust Survey
Is this title really fair?

"The City Council approved a package of bills that will halt new licenses for Uber and other ride-hail vehicles for a year while the city studies the booming industry."

While yes, this does impact Uber, it also impacts Lyft, etc.
True. How many rock bands have you heard going out to the community and passing out sample CDs?
Ha I knew it was bullshit! Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
> No economist has ever claimed that global trade is Pareto-optimal inside nations.

This is an important point, and I think plays into the question about tariffs (which, to be clear, I think are probably net negative).

The conventional argument is that free trade is a Kaldor Hicks [0] improvement, not a Pareto improvement. KH means that the sum of benefits and costs is positive, and it would be possible (in principle) to tax the beneficiaries and pay off the people harmed and create a synthetic Pareto outcome.

You could view tariffs as a clumsy attempt to apply the Kaldor-Hicks concept. I personally think there are much better ways, but I think the argument is at least plausible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficienc...
Ethereum just set a new low
There is lots of corruption and bureaucracy and lawsuit-avoidance driven construction. Right now the cost of constructing subway stations in NYC is the highest in the world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Is the $2000 amount the monthly rent, or the total purchase price of an apartment in Detroit?
"ha no this is absurd, this is not how any of this works" - Matt Levine

https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1027245773237436416
"They're ready to grab if you sensibly prepare a bunch of food ahead of time"

Families with parents who work multiple jobs are laughing their asses off at this idea of having time to do that.

"Besides, if I may rant a bit:"

Only if you want to show how out of touch you are.
> Whether a few less milliseconds from preloading on an already fast page really buys anything is another question.

On the technical side, it hardly matters. If the sales and marketing teams have bitten, they sell to management, and tech is informed they will be implementing it.

That's often how these things go, anyway.
43% of what?

That's a really small sample group - 1,003 people. The article link goes on to qualify only "363 Republicans". So we're saying maybe 156 people think that.

Numbers are from the link in the article that I copy and pasted below:

"These are findings from an Ipsos poll conducted August 3-6, 2018. For the survey, a sample of roughly 1,003 adults age 18+ from the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii was interviewed online in English. The sample includes 323 Democrats, 363 Republicans, and 207 Independents"

Are Polls ruining democracy?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-t...
but Suge was not the kind of person you demanded payment from lol

Just for the people who don't get the reference....

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/1137910...
==NYC is one of the few (like 2, maybe 3) America cities with an actual usable rail system==

Interested to hear what the other cities are. Chicago? San Fran?
> the cab drivers who are hurting because they provide an inferior service to a clientele who now have better options

This is a bill for bail out medallion owners, not cab drivers. Most NYC taxi medallions are corporate owned.
Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?
I don't generally expect society to listen if computer programmers tell them to do or not do something. But, just maybe, they might listen if programmers said, "don't use software for this", en masse. I feel like voting systems that have no voter-verifiable paper backup are a horrible idea and (in the literal sense) a threat to democracy. Is it possible for programmers to somehow get this message across to the rest of society? Or do most other programmers think this is not a problem and the security risks are overblown?
It's brilliant.
All you would need is a verified testing center program.

There are more libraries in the USA than McDonalds. Turn them into testing centers.
Because the UK government has a censorship program that prevented journalists from reporting on source material relevant to the interests of their citizens.
Cadillac had the first go in 2000. Mercedes and BMW have had night vision for little over a decade now while Audi and Lexus have more recently joined the fray, but all have had them out for at least one generation of vehicles.
I see your thousands, and raise you hundreds of thousands.
It doesn't solve the congestion problem though since lots of drivers are on the road for other reasons.
Fortunately for Twitter, the bots lacked the tenacity and capability for repetition that the humans had and did not create new accounts.
>I think there should be a financial disincentive to owning a car in the city,

Expensive parking on top of all the other costs is enough for most people who aren't pretty well off.
——————————————————————

Are you satisfied?

[yes] [no]

——————————————————————
Setting oneself up to be prey is not generally considered predatory - though faking it, as anglerfish do, is.
It’s a bit unclear to me what is so expensive about the load balancing nodes. Care that explain why it’s substantially more than a few round robin’d smart reverse proxies moving data to the correct storage node? With S3/Dynamo design the back end destination is largely known from the hash ring.

Also- Wasabi has fantastic pricing and full s3 compatibility.
The real issue is that cab drivers are committing suicide because of their debts. Simple market analysis ignores the real human toll these technological changes are making. Yes, better service should be rewarded. But those hurting should get some relief. (I personally don't care too much about medallion-owning companies/groups.)
> At least where I live women outnumber men at universities - meaning that if one partner in the relation has an "important career", it's very soon going to be more often the mother.

You can't logically conclude that based on that one data point.
>If you zoom out and crop, you still lose the same angular resolution to diffraction as if you had just stopped down at the longer focal length. Object space lens resolution is diffraction limited by the size of the entrance pupil, in exact inverse proportion to the depth of field.

Interesting - any real world tests to demonstrate this? When it comes to DOF, I'm not interested in logic or theory. I've seen too many flamewars that involve only theory and no actual field tests.

>Plus when you zoom out and crop you waste sensor resolution and photon gathering power...

I started digital photography on 2 MP. Then moved up to 8 MP. Then to 16 MP. From my experience, the difference between 8 and 16 MP is fairly small. The only benefit for me to go to higher resolution at this stage is the ability to crop and still get high resolution. Without cropping, I don't benefit from extra megapixels.

I'll concede the light per pixel point, though.
Right — This is a good analysis of _why_ many photos look nice, but often in practice you're intuitively creating compositions like this. As you improve you can "feel" and see what makes a good composition without thinking about it in such a blatantly technical way.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but

>> Obviously EDM is worse than others because of the nature of the 'E' of course

I don't think this is true.

I do think that the barriers to entry are the lowest in EDM - is the reason so much crap is being created there.

But those low barriers, that environment, is the ideal place for that lone creative genius, because, here it's all about the quality and quantity of great ideas.

No need for great band leadership skills. No idea will be "designed by commitee/band". No need for that great determination to learn technical stuff - maybe a quality less found in creative people. And it's relatively easy to form collaborations between geniuses, especially when everything is digital.

And at least if you love psychedlic music, the best EDM has to offer(say carbon based lifeforms or globular), is so much better than the best of what came before it(psychedlic rock, let's say pink floyd).
The HN readership has its own fascistic tendencies, including a large portion of its membership that defends censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

Increasingly, that's representative of the US population writ large.
Just off topic. Love the software ideas as GitHub repo idea.
Multiple engineers have testified before congress that they were ordered to make systems easy to hack. This has been going on for decades and nothing has changed AFAIK. I suspect everything will go fully electronic with no paper-trail, despite my having a paper trail every time I fuel up my vehicle.
This is also because in San Jose// San Francisco, most of the population is a single twenty or thirty something that only need a 1Bedroom. The demand for 1BR is therefore absolutely huge compared to 2+BR
Chicago and DC
>a) any commodity will eventually be priced at its cost of [production] //

The problem with this idea for the arts is that people are prepared to create music/art without a wage, so they absorb a primary cost of production (wages) themselves. Indeed they'll pay for everything, because it's enjoyable to create music. We could have no professional musicians and we'd still have more music created than anyone could ever listen to.

Also, "cost of production" should include wages, but what level of wage is right. Capitalism values people by their scarcity, but almost any musician could be replaced -- even top bands have replaced members -- meaning that for most music production capitalism will value the people making the music at around zero. So, you then need fashion (merch)/lifestyle/live shows to boost value. It strikes me that stars are made to increase the value of the music (selling a lifestyle) rather than because of the value of the music.
This is a pretty ridiculous argument to throw your weight behind given that there is a significant difference in timescale: 61 years vs. 9 years.
A congestion tax? That seems very unlikely to me, I would be shocked if car owners/users were not wealthier almost across the board.
Incredible Discovery of 44 Exoplanets After Technical Fault
It's pretty easy. Undecover bylaw enforcement can hail a cab, ask to be driven to Brooklyn, when the driver refuses, cite them, and pull their medallion for a month.

I guarantee you, after a few medallions get pulled, this problem will evaporate.

What you have is lack of will in enforcement.
That issue is present with everyone else also, not just cab drivers. I don't see why they should be singled out for relief. If we want to provide a safety net for people obviated by technology, that has nothing to do with Uber or Lyft.
i'll bite just a bit: you're concerned with sending your browser history to a third party but i assume are happy to send your search requests, hence search history, to a third party? i kinda understand the want to minimize the amount of third parties that know anything at all but otherwise don't see much of a difference in principal and history tells us that the search history may actually be worse.
If you could go back and tell your rookie developer/designer self one thing