skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
did it occur to you ... perhaps I wasn't arguing against terawatt capacity PV solar arrays across desert? ;)
> How the fuck are these cars legal anywhere?

Because product defects don't (in general) make the car illegal, they just incur strict liability for the manufacturer (and the chain of commerce, but in Tesla’s case that's moot except as to defects that originate upstream of them, since they sell direct to consumer) when they cause damages.
The incredible lightness of the Higgs boson
I use the URL bar for that :)
There's several things wrong with that statement.

1) Charter didn't really make $10 billion in profit last year. That figure is the result of a one-time accounting change: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/charter-announces-f.... This happened to many companies last year--when the corporate tax rate was lowered, they had to re-valuate any tax assets or liabilities using the new rate: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-deferred-liabilities-.... That resulted in big one-time gains or losses depending on whether the company had deferred tax assets or deferred tax liabilities. Microsoft booked a $6.3 billion loss in Q2 of this year for similar reasons. That doesn't mean Microsoft is losing money hand over fist!

2) It's more useful to look at Charter's income from operations (page 31 of their 2017 annual report: http://ir.charter.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112298&p=irol-reportsa...). That has ranged from $3 to 4 billion over the last few years on about $40 billion in revenue. That means that if Charter merely tried to break even, it could lower customer prices by about 10%.

3) Also useful is the breakdown of expenses, which starts at page 37 of the annual report. Out of $40 billion in revenues, $26 billion was spent on operating expenses. Of that, $10.6 billion is the cost of buying video programming, while the rest is maintenance, support, overhead, etc. That $15 billion-ish is dominated by labor costs. Then there is another $10 billion in depreciation, which is the annual decrease in the value of the actual network. The cost of building the network is not counted as an expense, but is instead booked as a capital asset. Each year, the accounting of income accounts for the decreasing value of that asset. That depreciation also reflects primarily labor costs (i.e. the labor costs incurred in building the asset).

4) Much of the plant maintenance and construction is handled by contractors, who wouldn't be counted in the 100,000 employees.
> and they'd have a car there in 5-10 minutes max

The introduction of low-cost options for Uber/Lyft were arguably as important a development as their original ride-hailing app ideas. Once the fleet was no longer constrained to professional drivers, and anybody with a spare hour or two (and a car) could go online, the size of the fleet exploded. That meant the likelihood of having a car near you - no matter where you are in a city - dramatically increased. Sure, call your local car service from home when you're heading to JFK and he'll be there in 10. How about when you're in the Village at 1am? How about Red Hook? Not to mention this allowed the service to be provided in cities all over the world which didn't previously have a car service at all.

> 10,000 highly-paid developers

Uber probably services more than 10,000x the number of rides than your car service did. I suppose you could try employing 10,000 "ladies with a phone" to handle that volume - but of course human dispatch quickly becomes unable to handle those kinds of volumes. Sorry, those developers are necessary for scale.

> and providing a marginally better level of service

Car-sharing with strangers was impossible before Uber/Lyft operated at scale. Share a car to work with some of your colleagues, who happen to live near you, sure. But to car pool anywhere at any time requires a huge fleet, and the technology to match riders who are taking the same route. That is an very difficult problem to solve, and yes it takes capable engineers. That car pooling allows fares which are probably around a third of what your car service charges. More improvements are on the way which should see short-medium trips of a comparable cost to public transport.

Not to mention providing this service in under-served and otherwise unprofitable areas, to minorities, at all times of day, all across the world. Plus of course a consistent name and brand, by far the biggest value-add ;)

Now integrate with other modes of transport - public transport, bikes, and yep even scooters. These companies are positioned to shape entire cities' transit systems (they already have, for better or for worse). They're not the same as your small car service, and they're not over-engineered. They're certainly not setting out every day worried about justifying their Silicon Valley existence.
we lived in huts and didn't have antibiotics or anything resembling modern medicine

When antibiotics were discovered, the world announced the end of disease. Today, there are endless articles about the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, plus dystopian fiction about a post antibiotics world.

I'm not 100 percent convinced we are as clever as we imagine ourselves to be.
Yes, yes, yes, yes? Flux.jl and KNet.jl. LightGraphs.jl. Etc. You can find these packages on JuliaObserver.com. Some of them are handled by PyCall interfaces: SymPy.jl, SymEngine.jl, QHull.jl, etc.
The ancestral post in this thread that listed many different types of NGOs backed by industry leaders who seek to enlarge their share of the spoils, and asked why unions should not be one of them. No one mentioned government involvement.

Maybe society is based upon competition?
Some thoughts for a decade strategy:

(1) the US will move to single payer health care. Besides the growing popular support for this, there is a coming crisis of corporate, municipal, and state pension funds which are unfunded to pay for their growing health care commitments. Single payer will be used to bail out those pension liabilities.

(2) Climate change. Consider effects on real estate of the placement of storm barriers, the increases of flood tides, etc.

(3) Self-driving cars. Lots of unexplored knock-on implications of the cultural changes. Dropoff without parking may reinvigorate walkable downtowns. Driving without attention required will enable longer commutes and combined work+commute with mobile offices. Cheaper last-mile delivery may push more retail shopping online. Introduction of drive-thru services targetting unoccupied vehicles -- dispatch a car to fetch something. The now high-end service of going shopping and asking for items to be sent back to your home could become commonplace.

(4) demographics. You can predict China's growth will soon slow looking at how the age distribution is projected to change.
What Programming Language Skills Do Employers Want? Indeed's Latest List
Tesla Shaken by Executive’s Quick Exit and Elon Musk’s Pot Smoke
> Externalities exist. Companies cannot pretend they operate independently of the communities they're based in.

True enough, higher wages cause prices of goods and services to rise. But again, the externality in this case is a result of workers having more money: exactly what everyone in the country, right and left, wants to see. That's why getting upset at them for that is silly.

It's like getting upset at green energy companies for making coal miners obsolete by getting cheaper and more productive. Yeah, that's an externality, and it sucks for those miners. But ultimately, that's still what society wants to have happen.

> Even if local zoning laws are at fault, these companies which spend lavishly on lobbyists at the national and provincial level, don't seem to be agitating for local change to improve housing conditions, which would better both their employees' quality of life and their own public perception.

No, they absolutely do. For example, Google is in frequent contact with the Mountain View city council over land use, for example, and has been supportive of adding housing to the north bayshore area where their HQ is.

However, many residents, especially long-term residents, are skeptical or critical of big tech companies, so they can only throw their weight around so much. Putting too much pressure on local cities would just cause a political backlash. Yes, Google is rich, but ultimately residents voting is what brings about regulatory changes. Contrary to what many Americans seem to think, companies can't just directly buy new laws.
Science academies urge paper ballots for all US elections
the site is working for me
How I got my first pull request merged on Rails-core
There should be a home email server called "Buttery Mail".
Linux Kernel Maintainer's Summit Moved to Edinburgh
Like RCall.jl and PyCall.jl? These have been around for awhile and are pretty simple to use. Just `@pyimport Package` and now `Package.function()` works, along with other things.
A Panda. By all laws of nature they should no longer exist, but due to human intervention, they do.
But the commenter is right. The saying is "burying the lede." There is no such thing as "burying the lead." The author of the article meant to borrow the jargon of reporters, to add color.

Your comment is like this more extreme example:

ARTICLE: I thumbled the plate and it shattered on the floor.
COMMENTER: The word is fumbled.
YOU: I would argue this is different because fumbling tends to apply to football.
Why We Procrastinate When We Have Long Deadlines
I am going to get down voted for this but the truth is that he is definitely not a genius and not a savant either. He thinks he is and keeps saying it but instead he is someone who can convince the average person that he is a genius. It is cringe worthy listening to him if you have any knowlege in any of the fields he is involved in.

There are actual geniuses and brilliant people working at space X and Tesla. For example the COO of space X who is the one that made the NASA deal yet I doubt anyone here knows her name.
Businesses fail and life goes on.
Mechanical Turk is basically laundering of grossly underpaid labour.
No thanks, as you end up in a database of people to be gassed, as socialist regime keeps progressing.
Twitter is a shithole of humanity where people get off on tearing people down.

The ultimate teardown is getting Twitter to un-person them.

(not my take, but thought it was interesting none the less)
There are good answers. But they're ones of housing policy and urban planning, not "#FuckOffGoogle", which serves literally no one.
The beauty of Julia is in its design as a language. This is what gives people hope that the tooling and ecosystem will emerge -- they all seem easier to develop in Julia than in other languages, thanks to multiple dispatch, the type system, and powerful metaprogramming abilities.

As far as fast bare metal languages go, you can write extremely general optimized matrix multiplication libraries in Julia. For matrices that fit in the L2 cache, I achieved performance similar to Intel MKL, but with far more generic code.

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/we-can-write-an-optimized-...

Writing a kernel in C means using SIMD intrinsics, where function names and types differ for every vector size, and then different numbers/sets of calls for each kernel (you'd want several sizes per architecture). Compare this to Julia, where parametric typing and multiple dispatch mean you only need one set of functions, and using an @generated function will generate whatever kernels you happen to need at compile time.

Looking into the future, awesome projects like Cassete speak to the potential of what's possible:

https://github.com/jrevels/Cassette.jl

Cassete promises to let you do anything from getting automatic differentiation for arbitrary Julia code, even if it is strictly typed and buried in a chain of dependencies of the library you're using and written by someone who never imagined the idea of autodiff, to injecting custom compiler passes.

Also, while I haven't tried it yet, many seem to like:
https://github.com/timholy/Rebugger.jl

Julia is more promise than practice right now, but that's largely because of just how much it promises. I (and many others) think it has done a great job delivering so far.
That's why there's excitement, and why many are starting to embrace it.
Well, any bugs you would get are very immediate (due to the strong static typing). As for your other point, lists are fairly rare. You only need arrays when you need arbitrary indexing into a list. Most of the time, however, you're simply iterating through the list in some fashion.
I, and many other nerds sound like that to other people when we talk of X or Y - having ideas and the ability to communicate them effectively is hard - especially when it is not just an idea - but a shift in perspective.

I feel strongly about this because I was trying to explain a possible implication of optogenetics to somebody this morning and suspect I came off sounding like a crazy person :)

What Musk is doing is making the familiar alien, trying to see from an external perspective holistically - which makes for results which are closer to something out of Ghost in the Shell than the everyday banality - and yet the banal world - when all the pieces fit together from a higher perspective really does possess an extraordinary big picture. Like the termites in the hill or Charles Darwin's understanding of how something normal (sex, reproduction rates and selection) really leads to something extraordinary.

Anybody looking through the macroscope will sound maladjusted until their beliefs ignored or become widely accepted. Think of that doctor who tried to get his coworkers to wash their hands. We have a hard time distinguishing between those and Coco the Clown. Our prior is 'if you don't sound like my internal monologue you must not be an ally and so be subject to suspicion'.

The other side to this - groups like Scientology take advantage of anybody who lowers their wards.
With NoScript in Firefox blocking all the javascript from running the article appeared, there was a browser scroll bar, and my scroll wheel caused the whole article to scroll with no problems.
Steven G. Johnson, who wrote much of FFTW in OCaml, is now a major Julia contributor! Or OCaml and C? Wikipedia isn't especially clear on that.
my understanding is that because valve's org chart is explicitly flat, the hierarchy becomes implicit and subject to internal politics. See this article for example: https://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/

If the total flexibility is theoretically there but in practice it isn't, I can imagine you'd end up with a lot of people self-suppressing so they don't break the unofficial rules.
Does it really matter to shareholders if Elon Musk is smoking pot?
That's a solid point, and I guess the stock market is a bad figure to talk about bankruptcy.

Instead, we can look at the Bond market for that. Moody's rates Tesla 2025 bonds at Caa1, and today the interest rate on Tesla has risen above 8.8%

The bond market certainly is pricing in the risk of default and/or bankruptcy at this point. 9%ish bonds are really bad on a 7-year bond, especially in today's market that's got relatively low-interest rate.
I think it depends on the size of the company rather than the city the company is located in.

I moved 800 miles to my current location, a city of 80000 in Oregon. My Employer paid to fly me out for the interview. I was also re-reimbursed for the move as well. The company is an international company with HR policies in place for moving people, there was no issue about my move.
The only constraint from the actual city was the fact that vacancy rates for rentals is < 1%. Its pretty near impossible to find some where to live.
Correct, and that's why I don't like encouraging messing with about:config. The few settings that can have any positive impact invariably come with drawbacks, which is why they're off by default.
Look for library science textboks from before ~1996. We used Organizing Knowledge, 2nd ed., by Jennifer Rowley for my intro to LIS back in the day. I wish I could remember the name of the text for my reference class. Ask any reference librarian, they'll be glad to hook you up.

Libraries are huge machines, consisting of paper and humans and furniture and architecture, for accumulating and processing knowledge and making it available. The reference section is the TTY of the library.
That's a good point. Ansible is robust, well-known, well-supported, and has support for doing anything and everything from creating users, to setting cron-jobs, MySQL users, and more.

This application only allows two things:

* Uploading a file, or series of files.
* Running a command, or series of commands.

In short I'm very simple. But because of that it avoids some of the horrors of trying to be overly-complex in the way that Ansible is. It avoids cryptic failures, and the horrible "language" for looping constructs, etc.

I could imagine adding support for cron, mysql, etc, but I think as soon as you allow real conditional actions to such utilities it becomes a mess to use.
The Contrarian Founder: Do your best to kill your idea
Personally I'm fine with either the market or the government providing new housing, and ideally I think we'd have a lot of both.

> This isn't changing zoning a little bit.

It's true, fairly radical zoning changes are warranted. Or at least, radical by US standards. Although you probably wouldn't have to go quite as far as Singapore, since obviously US cities aren't as land restricted.
From your original comment:

> Ah yes, "groundbreaking collaboration between humans and computers", which in this case actually means "pay a human below minimum wage to type numbers on a keyboard".

I agree that this is marketing speech (which is a reality of any business selling a product), but you implied that their operation is human-powered with only the illusion of machine interaction, which you go onto confirm:

> Gotta love corporate marketing speak. The only thing that would make this even more ridiculous is if Captricity claimed they were using the mystical "machine learning" too. Hmm, let's check their website.

If you had bothered to read the site you linked (or if you knew what OCR stands for), you'd understand that there is machine learning at play here, and not just for chunking up the documents. You made empty speculations about a company's technology for the sole purpose of denigrating them.

You might think this is splitting hairs, but these sardonic swipes lower the bar of intellectual discourse on this forum. It's OK to speculate about the technology in play, but not when you're insinuating that it's essentially fraudulent with absolutely zero evidence.
They would not be part of the clan back in India, and would not be part of the clan here.
Yes, they sell their services at a loss, so of course people will flock to them.
It gets weirder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rqBFvm2lME

And even weirder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLw3BaliDUQ
Genius is such a loaded term.

I think Elon's a smart guy. He has a big part in designing some of the rockets. However, I think his actual brilliance is in marketing. He (clearly) knows how to generate hype/buzz for all of his companies.

But yeah, I find it hilarious that people think he's the only reason why SpaceX and Tesla succeed. Tesla's taking a nosedive and SpaceX isn't largely because of Gwynne Shotwell.
>Employers are not and should not be required to pay you for work you are not doing. If maternity leave is important to an employee, it's important to negotiate it when arranging employment, or failing that, negotiate a high enough salary that you can afford to save for a couple months without income.

As if people have any negotiating power without unions, as if there is not a well-documented power imbalance in this country. Your attitude toward the common woman/man = why we can't have nice things. You and people like you labeling any thing that gives people a decent chance socialism = why we can't have nice things. Would you consider Denmark a socialist country?

Or maybe you were just being glib?
The band of "habitable by humans" is as wide as you could want. People live in Alaska and in Libya.

The problem is that stuff is adapted to the way things are. Alaskan trees, bugs, mail services and whatnot are all adapted to snow and ice and such. Bugs go dormant, mailmen hibernate. Libyan mailmen would freeze to death is they got Alaskan weather. Alaskan trees would die if they got Libyan weather. Crops would fail, etc.
Amen. And more importantly, still no Half-Life 3.
You can do stuff with a university degree, people recognize it. And you can do stuff with a car and money from a home finance. These might have predatory aspects to how you acquire them, but they aren't scams and nobody is being swindled.

You distinctly cannot do anything with bitcoin. There are a few dinky companies that will accept bitcoin as payment for unimportant knick-knacks and electronics, but that's about it. It will just sit, taking up space on a hard disk, until society decides to fully take it up as a currency (which won't happen in its current state).

An asset that has no use is not an asset, it's a liability.
This is like those "heatmaps" that are really just population density maps. California is the most populous state, on average there's going to be more people moving from there to elsewhere than other states.
Are there any plans to bring Elm to any non-javascript runtime?
> Coming back from the airport one time, one driver even tried to put my bags in another cab and tell me he'll finish the ride.

Sounds like you weren't dealing with a TLC-licensed driver, which all medallion cabs and all legal black cabs (including Lyft and Uber) are.
>Generic programming is difficult to handle with any AOT compilation system since you get a combinatoric explosion of possibilities leading to large compile times.

I thought it was either solved by adding function signatures based on actual usage, or “boxing” the argument (which I guess is just dynamic at that point)

Why would you ever see the combinatoric explosion in an AOT implementation?
Suggest adding a [2009] tag to let people know from whence this wonderful paper dates.
The Go runtime explicitly randomizes the iteration of map, because the language designers noticed 'Programmers had begun to rely on the stable iteration order'[0]. Most languages, as far as I can tell, tell you that the iteration order is undefined but frequently have some stable iteration order that's consistent for the compiler or the system architecture, and don't take the extra step of randomization.

[0]https://blog.golang.org/go-maps-in-action - Header: Iteration Order