skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's pretty well known that Ivy League schools are much harder to get into than they are to get out of, at least among college-aged people. That's by design, but also partly out of necessity; it's not possible to design a curriculum so difficult that only 2,000 students in the country can graduate, and then accurately select those 2,000 students from 50,000 applicants.
Tax is not a "cheap bandaid", it's literally the most direct solution you could impose on a market economy.

> with no incentive for corporations to make environmentally friendly products.

Competition is the incentive. As is profitability. A tax on bad business practice makes good business practices a better option.

> 1) as the tax will be broad. What if I invented a biodegradable capsule that decomposes after 6 months? No company will buy this invention. Because it will still be taxed.

Tax as defined by GP will not cover your invention.

> 2) company can make their process even cheaper than the tax imposed. Ie contents of two capsules is now one big capsule. Or use cheaper unhealither material.

If they could do that easily, they'd already have made it so. It is possible that a company would have no other option than doubling down on the bad practice, but they'd still be paying full cost for negative externalities - money the society could use to mitigate them. But the more likely outcome is that a company will switch to a method that's suddenly more profitable because of being untaxed.

At the very least, the tax would give companies a reason to look for a better way.
>> You simply don't get to "shop around" for emergency services

> You do actually, by where you choose to live

That's wrong on so many different levels:

1) The emergency service provider is unlikely to tell you how much anything costs in reality ahead of time.

2) Not all emergency services providers offer the best price for all services, or are even equipped offer all services.

3) Many medical emergencies are completely unexpected, you have no idea what kinds of services you'll actually need in an emergency.

4) You're not really talking about "where you choose to live," but rather "where you choose to be at all times." Do you really have a choice of ER if you have to stay within a couple miles of it at all times to make sure you'd always be taken there in an emergency?

5) etc.
> We do not have a free market. Most people get their health insurance from their employer - you cannot reasonably get insurance elsewhere

What you are describing are in fact the freest parts of the health insurance market.

Employers, quite rationally and of their own free will, choose to offer health insurance as a benefit because it attracts and retains talent better than other similarly priced incentives. The fact that you're hesitant to take a leave reveals that it's working.

Insurance companies, quite rationally and of their own free will, choose to offer steep discounts to purchasers who buy for a large group of people instead of just one or two. It reduces their marketing costs and gets them a better balance between sick and healthy clients.

You, quite rationally and of your own free will, choose to both accept your employer's offer of discounted insurance and to remain at your position longer than you would otherwise prefer to maintain that insurance coverage. In fact, the only thing you foresee changing the status quo and allowing you to retire at all is when you become entitled to benefits from the state in the form of Medicare.

Nothing in the phrase "free market" implies the resulting equilibrium won't conspire to limit an individual consumer's choices.
Not much of a hardware guy... so what would this be useful for and better at?
Microsoft doing all sorts of interesting things in the run up to Christmas: like open sourcing the Surface UEFI environment as Project Mu. The strategy is to make everything you want always up-to-date with timely fixes and new features.. turn it into "X-as-a-service" .. Microsoft did it with firmware UEFI via "project mu"
SVGjs 3.0 Advent Calendar – Day 19
I think the worst place I ever worked was like that. Was going back quite a number of years now but it was a startup fired up by a one of the lesser MBAs to utilise a legal loophole to slice cash off the public via a web app and a metric ton of marketing to desperate people.

Step one was hire everyone the guy had worked with at his previous company. They were all winforms / excel / SQL / sharepoint / office developers from big finance and had no idea where to go really. None of them had even touched asp.net.

Cue "what's popular". Well that was Ruby on Rails back then on top of MySQL and Linux. 4 people with zero experience pulled this stack in and basically wrote winforms on top of it. Page hits were 5-8 seconds each. Infrastructure was owned by SSH worms and they hadn't even noticed.

I think I lasted two days there before I said "I'm done".
Jump just made all new e-bikes to fix everything wrong with e-bike sharing
It’s about the closest market based solution that is likely to work. But I’ll cop to the turtle not caring, even if the extra revenue might 1. Reduce the likelihood the turtle ever even sees the cup or 2. Help cleanup the cups that are out there.

Since the turtle doesn’t care about the tax anyway, I’m willing to go the extra mile and simply ban single use polymer products altogether, and we’ll go back to however we handled things prior to their introduction into the marketplace.
Look, how I see these things is that we have tools. Do you think that people working on fields would fight over which tractor brand is better? Probably not. Do you thinks that builders would fight over which hammer brand is better. I don't think so. These fights over minor differences are happening mostly in the software industry. Freud wrote a pretty good thesis about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

Moving into databases is not something I understand. I worked the last 10 years as data engineer but I like to move out from databases a lot more than moving into them. :)
I hope there is not. If its elliptic, this planet is a bringer of instability to the solar system and the most likely suspect when it comes to the death of the dinosaurs. Such planets driveby gunning the innerplanets with asteroids might be a answer to the fermi paradox.
You can’t buy an ethical smartphone today
How we got our startup funded by Y Combinator while on H-1B
Also roads are primarily designed for cars. You have to adapt the rules for bikes.
The syntax and terminology are different, but MySQL has supported indexes on values inside of JSON (or any arbitrary expression/function) since MySQL 5.7, released about three years ago. In MySQL, you can define a "generated column" and index it in InnoDB.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/create-table-seconda... contains some JSON-specific examples.
> It's interesting how space research technology works, right now we can detect planets around distant stars many light years away but we are still unable to detect a planet several times larger than earth that is likely orbiting our own sun.

The planets we're detecting are all large, and relatively close to their stars - so much so that we can observe the star's brightness changing, as the planet passes in front of the star, or that we can observe the gravitational wobbles of the star, as the planet orbits it.

We would not be able to detect a Planet 9 orbiting around, say, Alpha Centauri.
Agreeable until the last sentence:

> Of course the problem is that the US is such a big country with huge immigration and scandinavian countries arent so it's always hard to compare.

US Population: 325 million

US Immigration: 1.5 million (2016)

EU Population: 512 million

EU Immigration: 2 million (2016)

(taken from top Google results)

It's fairly accurate to say that, compared to the US, the whole of EU has a "Scandinavian" model of health-care (ie, states guarantee good health-care services to everyone).
That's a really cool insight to driving habits. I always thought Adelaide had the worst drivers in the country. At least, that's what the statistics say.

Maybe we don't cut off people as much, but we sure can't do a zip merge without someone getting upset.
It costs a lot to modify an existing street vs build a brand new road, mostly because you have to modify drainage (Loop Link had concrete boarding platforms in the middle of the street that certainly would've disrupted existing drainage), bring the street up to modern standards, and keep the existing street open during the work for all the buildings that front it. It's really not all that simple.

In fact, the fact that it was on an existing street would make it very expensive to modify; look at a picture of the O-Bahn and there's plenty of space for construction vehicles and staging to set up, no one to get in the way of, etc.
They say an engineer is someone who can do for 10 cents what any fool can do for a dollar. I'd suggest that a salesperson is someone who can perform perform the same trick in reverse.
> a select group of people of average intellect

If, say, 10% of the students who were admitted this way succeeded would you change your mind? To me this sounds like the faked credentials allowed the students to skip the first filter (admissions), but that there was a second filter (top tier classes) that most of them failed.
We are building a pretty long BRT in Oakland and San Leandro, California. Yeah it’s costing a billion dollars. It does not have a true dedicated right of way since cars can theoretically block the box in front of the bus. But it does have all-door boarding, proof-of-payment with off-vehicle fare terminals, and signal priority.
> Hospitals charge this because they CAN. They are doing what businesses do and that is maximizing their profit.

Including all the non-profit hospitals? What's their motivation?
Not enough people actually tried to do what you did, so the high deductible plans didn't provide the desired result.

I think they could, but more people would need to be in them and try to do what you did. It needs to be enough people to eliminate the problem where insurance companies like the system being too complex because then you use them instead of paying for it our of pocket.
We recently added negative compression levels that extends the fast end of the spectrum significantly. We are also working on incrementally improving the strong end of the compression ratio spectrum. We don't expect plain zstd to compress stronger than xz, but we hope to close the gap some.
If they can walk over and deescalate, then of course I want them to deescalate. This isn't an action movie. Once bullets start flying, my odds of survival are likely going down, not up.

Do you think a policeman's job is to be a hero, or a public servant? Because I think they should be public servants. If one shows heroism while in the line of duty, it's because he is a hero and a good person. Not because of a paycheck and a badge.
You should totally link your blog. You can do so in your bio if want to avoid mentioning it here.
Undoubtedly, Google controls what happens in the Chromium stack (Blink/V8). I gotta admit that I don't know if MSFT's actually using Blink or just WebKit, so idk how much power Google effectively has over that.

But either way, the platform is not really controlled by the community. Sure you can file issues and pull requests or even fork Chromium but ultimately, Google still controls what's merged into the global Chromium master, so it's not really decentralized power.

Also, you've missed the main point. The problem here isn't that we don't have enough free/open source browser engines, the problem is that we don't have enough _different_ browser engines. If there's only one dominant browser engine, then whoever maintains that engine can decide how the web works. And that's kinda scary.
I do like the article but it sounds like they’re in over their heads, this whole (very risky) project could have been avoided if they just brought in someone that knew what they were doing.

> Clocks are important – don’t lock down your VPC so much that NTP stops working.

> Automatically generating database indexes on application startup is probably a bad idea.

> Database management is important and hard – and we’d rather not be doing it ourselves.

This is true of any database infrastructure with redundancy/scalability requirements.

What they did was take a technical problem and solve it by buying an off the shelf solution. Which is fine, of course, but I’m a bit surprised by the reaction here on HN.
I don't get it. Why not just brew some coffee with any other machine then? What's the Keurig bring to the table?
That's because the delivery person isn't far away so there's a decent risk of getting caught. If you know nobody is coming to save the robot for 20 minutes...
The difference is a company report backed up by regular inspections and then a bill versus the labor necessary to separate waste, track down the responsible producer, estimate the cost of their wasted products and send them the bill.
Solving the Blockchain Usability Issue: Meta-Transactions
Is it my English or is it 1.39 million kilometers across?
I have recently decided that I am totally fine with PWA in place of some apps (Gmail and Instagram among them) on my Phone. It works well but it wasn't obvious path.
Well water isn't trash, so just by virtue of producing the swiffer it's creating more waste than the alternative.
That sounds like a full time job of finding, editing and optimizing niche content. I'd consider that a fair job.

It's very far from the practice a long time ago of creating hundreds of domains linking to each other to get the top page, filled with placeholders and tags.
It does depend on your dataset. In my experiments, Zstandard did outperform XZ/LZMA in terms of compression ratio, but not by much. However, the massive improvement in decompression speed is what won me over.
I'm definitely someone of low ambition and likely low imagination, but I've never understood the desire as a journalist to fabricate when, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. For the sake of argument, let's assume that places like Fergus Falls, MN, are actually representative of the communities responsible for Trump's victory, and that Trump's victory, to the Der Spiegel readership, is a "bad thing".

The obvious "duh" narrative is that everyone in Fergus Fall is a multiple-gun-toting, sex-repressed hillbilly who wouldn't know the difference between or even the existence of Germany and Russia. Such a caricature is more "viral"/tweetable. But if you as a journalist wanted to raise the alarm about the rise of Trumpism, the far more disturbing story would be one depicting Fergus Falls as the "normal" and non-extreme place that it ostensibly is. Because that would imply the scenario of the "good German", where people are uncaring of the purported evil until it's too late.

That the Der Spiegel reporter went for fabricating schlock is, to me, indicative not just of his total lack of ethics, but also shallowness of thought, though maybe the two things are highly correlated.
The US healthcare system is the equivalent of xkcd's TornadoGuard app.

https://xkcd.com/937/

You only find out just how badly it works when you need it the most.
There's so much that _feels_ misleading here.

Paragraph before the chart:

"The benefits we’ve found typically range from a 30 percent better ratio to 3x better speed."

In what cases? What methodology was used to evaluate this? I certainly expected a scientific (honest) treatment of how the performance was evaluated and the corresponding trade-offs to follow on at some point.
They advance in an Ivy League school and you still say they have an average intellect? Why do you say that? Either the majority of the students have an average intellect or these students have an above average intellect.

Ivy League schools don’t look for the smartest 18 year olds. The intent is to make them the smartest 22+ year olds.
Am I the only one getting sick of "at scale"?
> because border specific stuff aren't worth the hassle

For GitHub maybe, not true for all (or even most?) non-EU businesses. For most, the "hassle" of ignoring the region requiring GDPR is much easier/safer than the compliance/risk of conformance.
Considering that sometimes mechanics forget to do basic things like tighten oil drain plugs, that happening wouldn't surprise me.
The hard parts of "SQL" are the hard parts of data. Joins aren't easier in Mongo. The performance optimizations you reference are tuning of a relational database, not SQL itself.

If you want to work with databases a domain specific language like SQL really provides a lot of value in solving these hard data problems.
IIUC, much of healthcare billing in the US is governed by discrete codes for services performed. I suspect this allows big customers like Federal Gov't & insurers to audit bills easier. In order to either be more specific about the bills or allow less wiggle room, they made these codes remarkably more specific recently (ICD-10 [1]). IMO the descriptions of the items in these codes are humorously specific. Imagine if your auto mechanic got $650/hr for labor, I suppose you would get much more specific invoices for their work too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10
They are equally dangerous in the sense of creating a potentially fatal incident.
Pretty interesting. I bet if you took that same group and said Facebook now costs 1000 a year to use they would all quit.

It’s easier to spend money that wasn’t in your wallet in the first place. It’s when you start taking it out of the wallet that people react.
Even with HSTORE/JSONB columns? I would imagine (gut feeling, no evidence) that the performance of these is worse than more traditional column types.
"The US basically toppled a ruler of a stable country, gave the "good side" a bunch of guns, and told them that anyone who opposes them is evil."

That "country" could also refer to Germany or Japan of 1941.
That's assuming there's only one tunnel. As the article mentions the point is to dramatically reduce the cost to bore tunnels, so you can bore more of them.

If you could bore 4x the tunnels, you'd need a capacity of 4 people per car to match peak BART. And... hey, that describes pretty much every car in existence. But using the BART comparison: recent estimates [1] put each additional mile of BART track at over $1 billion. So if it really costs $10MM/mile for the Boring Co, you could bore 32x the tunnels and beat BART capacity by a factor of two assuming even single occupancy vehicles, at about a third of the cost.

[1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...
Law Schools Are Bad for Democracy because the US is a Republic not a Democracy.
There's a special circle in hell that should be reserved for people like this.
Thank you! I was reading through the comments wondering how no one has seen through the bullshit veil purported by the title, followed by a detailed outline of their migration which I think is the "shiny object" to distract people from an unfounded argument.
He definitely spent 50k between 1997 and when these machines really started to take off.
I'm in a similar situation. In addition, I participated in many programming competitions (ACM qualification rounds, TopCoder, 2 or 3 CodeJams, tons of local ones), I even won some. But every time I look at Google interview questions, I'm like - NOPE. It's all about luck. You can get a simple question that you know the answer to, or not. In that case there's rarely enough time to solve a problem, and they usually want the best solution. And the odds of you coming up with a good solution to a hard problem are very close to zero.
I'd deactivate for 5 bucks. I don't see or hold any value in it. I really don't care about an old school friends meal, who I would only have a fake "hi, how are you", then an awkward silence with if I met them anyway. Linkedin on the other hand has a foundation of worth, as does HN.
From the boot options screenshot, I can't find any trace of the one thing I look for in UEFI implementations - ability to easily unlock the secure boot state and boot some arbitrary OS. This seemingly fails to meet even the lowest bar for a good-enough UEFI implementation.
How Does My Garden Grow? With Drones, Sensors, and AI All in a Row
Spam is That Which We Don't Do

https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/that-which-we-dont.html
Exactly... enough is to see how people react to the simple idea of "paying" for FB, even 1$
I guess the study is funded by FB toward the investors... :-D
I've taken the O-bahn for a couple of years when living locally. It's great. You can't wait to get out of traffic and hear the bus just roar to high speed in a straight line, with only a few stops to being a half-hour away from the city.

I'm sad to read that they limited it to 85kmh. In my time, they definitely were going 100kmh, and every nuts and bolts rumbled on these old buses... Mostly the fault of the cement track, not the bus themselves. :)
I think everyone acknowledges the current system is the worst of all worlds. _Both_ the left and the right are correct in my view: (1) single payer universal healthcare or (2) removing a ton of the existing government regulations and forcing healthcare to behave more like a free market, would each be better than the existing system.

I don't think "free market healthcare" is oxymoronic though. It does not seem to me impossible (logically...maybe it's impossible politically) to remove the current incentives that prohibit price discovery and/or enact laws and regulations that incentivize it.
*Uranus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune
Manhole Covers Serve as Antennas Expanding Wireless Network Coverage
Music uses vacuum tubes due to the sounds that they produce.
It doesn't sound fair to me, but to be fair, you probably get your news from the Daily Show.
Exactly! If I had the opportunity to go to an institution with Harvard-tier educational opportunities and reputation but no legacy admissions (merit-based only) or one where a third of the students were children of the rich and powerful, I know which one I'd choose.

(Of course, if I was one of those "children of the rich and powerful" I'd probably choose the first school - much better environment for finding opportunities to invest in. Less competition, after all)
Imagine you're sitting relaxed in a dark, forgotten corner of asteroid X, five billion kilometers from the sun.

Imagine looking up and seeing the feeble sunlight. Some of it gets reflected back and starts a long journey toward some telescope on Earth.

Now imagine seeing "extremely powerful laser" from earth. Some of it gets reflected ... (ditto).

For your method to work, the latter must be more powerful than the former.

In other words, if you point your laser at Mars, a Martian should suddenly find the Earth shining brighter than the sun.

I don't believe mankind possesses such power yet (thank god).
Exactly. This is still a work-in-progress.
> The current choice already costs many times the purchase price in electricity use, so if anything, they chose a value too long.

But is it still "many times" when you factor in the costs of manufacturing it (all the way to marginal costs of mining the materials) and transporting it to the stores?

I really wish products were evaluated in terms of total costs; the shop price gives near zero information about the sustainability impact of a product.
An 8-minute introduction to K8S
there are actually a couple of real interpreters for Go:

- neugram.io

- https://github.com/cosmos72/gomacro

here is a mybinder that used to use the former, and now uses the latter:

- https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/go-hep/binder/master
..add "Seattle" to US cities with decent numbers of software engineers making $150k+.
> I think parent's complaint is that Debian's model has failed to produce good solutions of its own

Debian must be producing very good results, and doing so consistently. Otherwise Debian wouldn't be either the most successful linux distro or the distro that is forked by the vast majority of leading distros.