skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've personally had enough problems with taxi drivers (and I live in a developed country) that I will only take a taxi as a last resort. They overcharge, they demand cash because apparently their EFTPOS machine is broken, they drive you on the scenic route to increase the fare, or they'll try to set a fixed price when you know it's cheaper to run the meter, half the time the driver doesn't even know how to get there and I have to navigate them.

Just last week I got woken up at 3 AM by a distraught housemate being dropped home by the police because a cabbie sexually assaulted her. It's fucking disgusting what cabbies manage to get away with and then claim "Uber is bad because it's unregulated". Uber's self regulation has proven to be vastly superior to the taxi industry.

Meanwhile with Uber, my experience has been 90% positive. It's incredibly rare to have a driver try to rip me off and it's a lot safer in general. I'm absolutely sure that the cabbie who assaulted my friend has done it before to other people, and will do it again to some other poor drunk girl. I live in a Australia, this shouldn't be an issue we're facing, but it is.

I don't know what Didi is like compared to Uber, but I'm absolutely sure that it's better than cabs, especially in developing countries.
Openwater – MRI-like scans using light
Kudos for taking the time for doing this! It's places like these where the HN community really shines.

Thanks a lot!
Looking for "orca" I was expecting black and white, but got only blue.
I think I mentioned it earlier, but the idea is that the commands are immutable -- API growth happens through accretion only. New APIs must handle a superset of old ones.

Realistically, this is basically the same as how it's handled in most APIs today -- until you can guarantee (or choose to strictly enforce) that no one use a particular API, it just stays.

In addition to this, new instances use completely different databases, but rely on the replaying the stream of commands that got the old instance there to catch up (and new commands as they come in).
> how important are the differences really?

The differences are very important. In one, the prisoners are ideally a threat to the members of their society in some way: rapists, con artists, thieves. In the other, the prisoners are only a threat to or a scapegoat for the already-powerful rulers: intellectuals, dissidents, minorities.

> whether you are in a Chinese prison or a US prison does it really matter which injust, ridiculous, hypocritical system put you there?

Yes it does, because they're not "injust, ridiculous, hypocritical" to anywhere near the same degree.
Welder here. I don't buy helium for welding any more because it's too expensive; most welders use argon nowadays. But in any case the whole point of using inert gases in welding is to keep oxygen away from the hot metal. If welding-grade helium tanks contained any significant amount of oxygen they would defeat the whole purpose. And yes, for filling balloons, you just buy a tank of welding helium and screw a special balloon regulator onto the outlet port. The gas is identical. Makes you talk in a squeaky-high voice if you breathe a little of it; kills you dead if you breathe a lot of it.

(Edit: I know somebody is going to ask why it kills you. Helium is not toxic, but it suffocates you if you breathe a lot of it without a break for -- you know -- real air.)
And with that realization - there is no end to learning - you have entered the company of The Wise!

Which qualifies you to sit back, quit struggling, and chuckle at that dilemma you were (and so many are still) caught in.
They didn’t list google maps and google translate.
Once we have live translation speech to speech, the world will see a real reshuffle of populations, not just tourism.
Vie Privée
To put it lightly, the syntax is odd. LaTeX doesn’t always pay off in the short term.
The concept of "status illegibility" is certainly an interesting one that coincides with some experiences I've had. In a former role in which I reported to the VP of Engineering, due to his lack of ability to directly evaluate work, he would base performance reviews on a weighted average of your teammates' assessment of your work. As such, it was very much, as the linked article on status illegibility states, that the "illegibility of the status of any member of a group is proportional to his/her distance from the edges of the group." In other words, performance near the median was widely praised, but performance both near the bottom or top received criticism. It was not a pleasant experience.

Another hard-learned fact that he mentions is that being good at your job is overrated. Few of us would like to admit that, but as he explains, the benefits of some automation vs. no automation greatly exceed the benefits of some automation vs. better automation. The only workaround that I've found for that is evaluating roles for their need for technical excellence. Building a CRUD app to "revolutionize the [insert favorite industry here]"? It's not going to require or reward technical excellence. Unfortunately, the kinds of projects where technical excellence is legitimately required and rewarded are relatively rare.
HomeStarRunner
As mixmastamyk said, it's exactly the same as the gym (I work out ~5 days a week too and I started from being the least athletic person in school/college).

I hear people say — I'm already 30 and starting to exercise is too late, or that they're intimidated by other people at the gym, or that they don't know where to start. Having gone through a similar experience as yours, I gotta say you just have to start. Don't overthink it. You'll fail. Try again, keep at it, and eventually there'll be a breaking point.

Good luck.
Hey Samay! To all in the thread, I started Hack Club and am happy to answer any questions about the org.

Liam, this is super cool. I also got started young and wish I had the skills to frontpage at 12 :-). Keep it up!

Would love to have you say hi in the Hack Club Slack. I'm @zrl.
Lets assume Russia was responsible for serious election interference.

Now What ?

Is the US going to add MORE sanctions on Russia ? Russia is not North Korea.

The EU or US is going to go to war with a nuclear armed state, get real.

Sometimes I wonder, why it is always the fault of outsiders ? 9/11 (result of so much meddling in ME for 40 years ), 2016, mexican drugs, immigrants taking jerbs.

Unless society takes responsibility for its own problems things will not change.
Okay I really enjoyed this. Well written and entertaining. I was at the time on the other end of this, with OS/2 where everything really was an object you could do stuff with. Need a printer, open templates and drag off a printer one, fill in some info. I really liked the WPS in OS/2. Some of the stuff you cannot do even today. Moved on to Solaris and IRIX (I know, I was doing that internet thing at an ISP) and then NeXTStep. Hey Apple I want the damn NeXT shelf back!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing)
You seem to be equating "extraordinary" life with "providing the best life for oneself" and an "ordinary" life with "providing the best life for one's child". Is that correct? If so, I don't see why that should be.
Except in India it’s quite high and most go unreported.
Do you have data? That sounds like speculation.

https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx
Would you please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? That's not what this site is for, and we've asked you already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’ve been doing real estate for about 25 years and haven’t seen much risk at all. Biggest risks have been vacancy and maintenance. Vacancy is solved by setting the right rent and maintenance is a 10% reserve fund.

Also I said “almost risk free”. :)
Cali is different. And safety trumps all. You can use it to draw attention to dangerous situations.

The cali law basically states that the cop can ticket you for being a jerk about honking.
It's also filtering for safe search. So, there are results that are assuredly indexed by Google, but the query stalls the page.

If you try linking to https://picular.co/four+letter+words

...some of those four letter words won't return results, even if they do exist. Probably because they (futurememories.se) don't want to associate their product with lewd profanity, if/when people start sharing random links on social media.
I don't know what is more absurd: that the president uses a private medium like twitter as a seemingly primary channel to communicate with the nation, or that a private entity is being forced to operate as a public, regulated forum.
Super polite legal notice tho!
Finally somebody else that had this thought too. Those all sounded to me like really good things to do. Child abuse and human trafficking are heinously evil. If lerna thinks they are lying, they should say that instead of misrepresenting the truth to make a political point.
If page load is that fast according to your description, how come can I still have the time to click on "Load basic html". By the way, that one is truly lightning fast.
Trump’s Ludicrous Attack on Big Tech
It's still a waste of his time to deal with it. The brain has only so many ultra-neuroplastic years, why burn them on dicking around with npm when they could be leveraged to focus on more universal concepts?
Please do not post partisan flamebait to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Oooooooooh. That’s interesting... So the founders got theirs already. Nicely de-risked.
The End of an Epidemic
You're right.

I saw this post on the bus, installed the app. Checked what it says for my transfer. I had about 8 minutes.

Google said my bus comes at 7:29. Transit app says it comes at 7:37. The bus came at 7:29. The app didn't match the posted time table either.

This is in a major tech area next to a major university. Their About screen lists dozens of local transit authorities as data sources, with the one running the bus in question as a licensed source.

App deleted.
It's 10x lower than the West. Do you think the number being unreported accounts for that order of magnitude?
> Product can't be "good" if it's not based on frequent and lots of conversations / interactions with users.

It also can't be good if you're not implementing the ideas being surfaced in those interactions, and implementing takes longer than talking with people. If you have a conversation with someone and end up building something they ask for that takes six weeks of full time work, then does it really make sense to delay the timeline on shipping that feature so that you can keep talking with more potential users who will likely have the same objections anyway? I'm not trying to justify not talking with users, but at the same time once you've gotten the message, it may be time to hang up the phone.
While the US economy is doing great, it feels like the US workers are doing worse than ever. Spiraling healthcare costs, unaffordable housing, student debt and a lack of real wage growth are all pinching the middle class out of existence. Unemployment is low, but many of the job gains are in low skill temp positions and the gig economy.

As is usual for the past 20 years, capital is doing great while labor suffers.
Looks like the APKG format is a SQL dump[0], so perhaps, depending on how determined you are. My cards wouldn't be too useful as they are because many cards contain English prompts ("Which verb forms must have their direct objects incorporated into bound states?"), and the cards that do contain words have various inconsistencies depending on the part of speech, such as lemma-like forms that you would never see in an actual text as-is for prepositions, or multiple conjugation bases for verbs. So yeah, it'd be a hassle to put it into a normalized format. Sorry about that.

Not sure what the nature of your interest is, but I'm sure you must be familiar with what a Swadesh list[1] is? It's only a couple hundred instead of a thousand, and the words (or rather, their meanings) are chosen in advance, but it's a close concept.

[0]: http://decks.wikia.com/wiki/Anki_APKG_format_documentation

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list
> We also did a mass invite not long ago that changed things up a bit.

How did that work? I do wonder what the geographical distribution is of Lobsters since it grew through invites.
Germany was occupied for decades after WWII. However, it's hard to imagine that it's still under US occupation now. I mean, how could something like that remain secret? But on the other hand, how would I know?

And see "We're all living in America" aka "Amerika" by Ramstein <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr8ljRgcJNM>.
The only thing you need to learn programming with JS is a text editor and some rudimentary HTML knowledge.

Everything else is unnecessary, at least as far as the programming language itself is concerned.
This, the people you think wouldn't have the relevant skills can surprise you! My wife went through a couple professional VAs who were... set in their ways and expensive for what they were delivering and then hired a recent college grad with absolutely no experience and she's been a total lifesaver.
When did the TSA make flying safer and cheaper?
I'm a PhD student in computational linguistics. My advisor is the principal for a repository of digitized Coptic texts[1], and while I wasn't required to learn the language as a part of my role as a research assistant on this project, I wanted to because it'd make my contributions better. (And I had a couple of months of free time in the summer after I quit my job and before I started school.)

[1]: http://copticscriptorium.org/
Easier recipe: Mix ketchup, liquid smoke, and Sriracha. Don't cook or wait or any other funny dance. You'll get all of the same ingredients and flavors as above only with fewer...uhh...ingredients. No food processor required because Heinz, Huy Fong, and Colgin already did that part for you.
Good point, but unfortunately the focus of the project is only the RISC-V core running in a FPGA. Everything else is already widely available in the internet and can be easily integrated.
Big VC funds pay like that.

Entrepreneurs turned VC often don’t have the dry powder to pay themselves well when they use their own cash to start fund 1.

Not all Vc’s are equal.
Hmmmm, 'Science Alert' has a headline that calls stones 'Sinister'?

Methinks science has taken a backseat to rhetoric, regardless of the substance of the story.
There’s a clever market force here in forcing a business to cover the costs of a government program if a company’s employees use it; it’ll be in the best interest of the company to then provide just enough wages and internal services to allow their employees to live a healthy life while a less efficient state run program pulls back on its necessity.

For example: Amazon could end up paying their employees an extra $3/hour while eliminating the state costing taxpayers $6/hour equivalent of benefits run through layers of bureaucracy. The difference is that instead of the entire tax base holding the bill, it would be the customers of Amazon.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165395

The language Madoko has been written in is even more interesting: Koka. https://www.rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/koka/
I once trying to dig out the crime rate (not murder rate) of our city in South China, at least trying to have a grasp on what's going on. (TL;DR: and failed)

The only related data that I (as a citizen, not insider) can found is in the annual report published by the local court, which basically just a statement on how many criminals the court have prosecuted, only a number, no detailed categorization.

I also searched for the "population" of the local prison, the only data I can found is inside a news article about prison location transfer published on the Ministry of Justice's website few years ago, which stated "All XXX prisoners are successfully transferred".

None of the data is reliable enough to calculate the real crime rate of our city, as the local and prison may also handle cases from other cities, vice versa.

Because of all that, the value of my little "research" is far less than having a small chat with a friend of mine who work for the local police department.

Maybe this also the reason of why rumours in China got it's charm.
Thoughts?

https://www.businessinsider.com/wages-growth-is-weak-due-to-...
I've had misgivings also, but mine related to how the application would read in the enums versus a simple reference table the app can do a select once and prep the data or we could generate code for the same.
At least they're voting it up on a forum that is.

I mean, it's just a forum; it bloody well should be; but it could so easily not be.
Federal pension is not that high, just so you know. It's 1%/year, unless you have 20+ years and retire at 62 (not collect, you are still working for the government at age 62 and retire with 20+ years of service). Then it's 1.1%/year. With 17 years you get 17% of your high three year average. You can't collect that pension until you're 62, unless you want to take a penalty.

Now, if you're including the TSP (401k equivalent), maybe? That's 5%/year extra if you also contribute 5%. However, that's what you and the government put into the account, not what's available when you retire. Perhaps it works out to close to 3% average with some estimate of your TSP earnings? I never crunched those numbers.

Government salary ranges can be found at OPM. Look up the GS pay scale. Programmers will be GS-12 to GS-14 positions (most likely 12 or 13, 14 if you're a true subject matter expert, have a Phd, or maybe work at the right facility, otherwise 14s are management).
> and their speed difference with cars isn't remotely as big as that between cars and bikes.

Cyclists can go between 10 to 20 mph. Some faster ones can go 25 to 30 mph. On a city street, you have cars going between 20 to 30 mph. On other roads, they may be going up to 40 mph. Given typical speeds, you have a 0 to 30 mph difference.

On highways, there are trucks that are limited to 55 to 60 mph amongst cars that go 70 to 85 mph. In that case, you have speed differences ranging from 10 to 30 mph.

> Bikes taking up the place of a car, would really slow car traffic down to a crawl.

Not really. If there are multiple lanes of traffic going in the same direction, then they don't slow down traffic any more than a bus would. If there's a single lane of traffic going in that direction, then cyclists are far more easy to pass compared to a bus or truck. In many states, it is legal to pass cyclists by crossing a double-yellow line when safe to do so. Second, it's much easier to see around a cyclist compared to a bus or car.
Hey g3rv4 sorry to hear the news. Although I personally don't use slack, when I saw your last post (congrats on the double front page btw) I was super impressed by the stuff you'd added, sorry to see it go.

So this seems rather unfortunate now but the first thought I had on reading your initial post was "wow, I wish he'd come and do some similar stuff for riot[1], but unless slack shut him down there's no chance." However lo and behold here we are, so I thought I might as well reach out. If you haven't heard of it, Riot can be described as "an open source slack" although I think that's unfair on it, it certainly lacks certain features that slack has (although with its current rate of development this gap is shrinking) but also can do things slack just can't.

Full disclaimer I'm not a developer on riot (or matrix[2] the open protocol it implements), just a happy user so I can't speak with true authority but I think they'd be happy for you to make these sorts of changes to riot.

So I invite you to come check it out, I hope you find it compelling. At the very least riot has a means of bridging to slack (along with irc, gitter and more) which you might find helpful in dealing with slack (I know I do).

Hope your future endeavors so smoother, I look forward to seeing whatever you create next.

[1]https://riot.im/
[2]https://matrix.org/blog/home/
Yeah, that’s what companies do : look at the stats. And as long as stats say it’s rare enough, it’s not that bad.

People are boycotting not because there’s a higher chance of being murdered/kidnapped with Didi, but that the company was unresponsive, did not have proper procedure/policy for vetting drivers, and took way too long to get even basic info about the suspect driver.

What the stats say here, higher or lower, is moot. Because the issue is that Didi does not give a shit about passenger safety.
That's an interesting (and valid, imo) point. My guess is that on Twitter the prominent experts are less interesting because:

1. They're already speaking from a position of superiority in a certain sense, whereas on HN you're just in a conversation with everybody. You might be pretty important, but then maybe Alan Kay will jump in or something.

2. There isn't the same kind of prompting on Twitter that we get from the stories here which commenters are replying to. Instead, it's just the expert talking about whatever they want: maybe interesting to them, but not so much to everybody else.

3. The Twitter format doesn't encourage the same depth of discussion as HN, stemming from the initial character limit, but perhaps now just a vestigial consequence.

It could be interesting to have a site somewhere between HN and Twitter though—something that filters out more newbs/trolls, but doesn't exclude capable unknowns. Maybe you need an invite from someone involved in order to join, or maybe there are some questions you'd be required to answer which might establish you're on the right side of some threshold of intelligence, creativity, decentness, ability to communicate, etc.

Then again, I also agree HN is doing a pretty good job of ensuring good comments become visible.
My health. The past several years have been a journey of finding a diet and lifestyle that minimizes the pain and discomfort.

The other half of that is, when genetics and circumstance have such a crippling impact on one's ability to live a "normal life", how do you cope with it emotionally and spiritually? That's the more challenging half of what I struggle with.
From personal experiences and reading online, I noticed that quite a few universities dedicate at least one course to teach Matlab (STEM majors excluding CS). Often, upper div labs will require some sort of programming knowledge because large amounts of data needs to be analyzed and manipulated. I found Matlab to be a great introductory language but I've also been learning/using python more recently.

After a brief overview of this pdf, it seems like a solid resource for those who took Matlab courses (like myself) but wish to use python instead. One thing I love about Matlab is how easy the learning curve is to do simple plots and functions. Also not having to deal with whitespace. But, Python seems more practical since you can use it for any type of project. General STEM job requirements also usually list Python and rarely mention Matlab.
Lerna Open Source Version
JS is an objectively bad programming language. It is not fine, it is just annoyingly common and convenient. The main advances in its ecosystem are related to transpiling it from other, saner, languages. If he has fun writing JS, then great for him. He's 12, he'll do it if he wants. But it'd be doing him a disservice not to open his eyes to much wider, greener pastures of the programming world.
Better discoverability was one of the primary intentions. Shame it led to less usability for everyone else (ie all non-beginners), with an arbitrary mix of text, text+icons and mystery find out only on rollover icons.

There was much to be said for hierarchical menus, now it's partially guesswork to even decide which tab the required choice is on.

Anecdotal for sure, but the old interface seemed to be missed most by the very users that the ribbon was intended for - those needing to discover, rather than already knowing, which feature to use. There was a lot more piracy of Office 2003 after 2007 came out.