skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The slide deck at https://www.obrc.com/Content/Reports/OBRC%20Quarterly%20Repo... says $34M/year, so agrees with you.

As a theoretical point, even with a 100% return rate, it's still possible to make money on the float. Buy a 12-pack, deposit $1.20, return 1 week later, get $1.20 back, but in the meanwhile that buck-and-change could make ~1/50¢ in interest.

The same report says they do about 2 billion containers / year, which at 10¢/container is $200M. In the optimistic case of 1 year between purchase and return, assuming 2% interest, that's $4M. Assuming 1 week, I think it's $100K, so not much.

A more likely income source is the profit from selling relatively clean metal, glass, and PET. That report says 151.0 M Aluminum Cans per quarter. I see numbers around 2¢/can for the metal value, so that's $3M/quarter or call it $10M/year.

So even with 100% return rate, there is still money coming in. Just (as you say) not enough to pay for the program.

FWIW, https://www.obrc.com/Content/Reports/OBRC%20Annual%20Report%... says that there was "$25 million" in "Estimated value of 2017 unredeemed deposits". That plus the Al can value is easily enough to pay for the program.
it's not perfect but definitely superhuman from what I see. These are demonstration matches and afaik they want to tune the "mechanical" abilities of the agents to be somewhat in the realm of the strongest human players but it's not a trivial thing as not every action is equal and just picking a APM number would make the AI way weaker than a human in some areas (splitting marines, building/morphing lots of units ) and way stronger in other areas (multitasking)
Wow, what a weird and counterproductive way to implement unions. In Sweden, that's not even remotely how unions work, they're voluntary. That's a pretty messed up system you have, would you be more interested if they're fully voluntary?
It sounds like each match in the Bo5 is against a different agent. It's a hair dirty, but I don't think it's too bad because the same kind of random-selection strategy is just as possible "in the wild".
It really doesn't matter what the market bears because software is so malleable that companies spend dozens of hours creating loot box systems, marketplace systems, data driven pricing models etc. to squeeze every last dollar out of the customer, regardless of whether the demand is high for these things or not. It doesn't matter if their product is half broken or is barely a product at all, as long as they can create 50,000 skins.
Then again, I'm not sure what demand for these systems are, but considering how universally detested they are, I would assume not much.
https://duckduckgo.com/ does not have this problem. (And it has really good search results too)
It's because it's a dream for people, comparable to working on movies. That's like saying why should a AV technician not work on movies when they can make more money doing recordings for corporate events.
I don't need 'the collaboration benefits' of having my desk in an open-office hell, but I get them anyways, with no ability to negotiate.

I put up with it because it's a 'take it or leave' it condition of getting a paycheck.
I think Betteridge's law of headlines definitely applies here :)
So we're going to burn incredible amounts of fossil fuel and destroy the ecosystem because a bunch of morons can't figure out how to go find someplace quiet to sit for a while?

And why can't these idiots get their families to leave them alone for a while in their bedroom or whatever?
Yeah, that's a special wrinkle because industrial labs are such a big part of the "academic" research ecosystem right now. Can Google use this code to give comparative results in a follow-up paper? If so, how do they separate their research activity from commercial activity (esp. given business benefits such as recruiting)?
What's interesting about Google is, they can have open source products that are hated a big % of devs (Angular) and something that doesn't have that problem (Tensorflow).

I wonder what's the underlying issue behind this disparity. Wonder if it the teams themselves behind those products...
How do you contribute to a dev directly? Also, how do you decide who to contribute to?

When it comes to AAA games (which is who is really exploiting their employees rather than indies) it sounds like you're picking someone at random, (e.g. "Today's your lucky day Shading Engineer #4, please accept this venmo.")
This is very interesting data, thank you for that. Maybe MS has improved a bit although I haven't felt any improvements yet. But the changes might not be rolled out completely. Performance wise it can only get better in my opinion.
Office 365 is now on Mac App Store
>In fact, just look at the quality of life of a worker in a place with strong labor (say most of the EU) vs say, the US.

My wife is from the UK, I've looked into things there. I make 4 times what I would make in the UK, and that's before the additional taxes I'd pay (and before you ask the additional taxes for the NHS exceeds my spend for health insurance + copays). Sure they get about two weeks more vacation but I wouldn't trade that for 3/4ths of my salary why should I be forced to do so?
Isn't it...the opposite of elitism?
Years ago we did it by barcode. It sounds like there is some reason that does not work now, but back when I would bother to return soda cans, the machine that collected/crushed them would scan the barcode and reject the out-of-state ones.
Ask HN: I have 5 % stake in a startup, how much should I work?
I got 5 % stake in a startup because I do technical work for the founders. I have created the website with an online shop and some individual functions in the background. Currently I have invested about 100 hours, the founders knew this beforehand. I get a one-time payment of around $1000.

We have discussed that I can do some work during the year, the question now is how much time should I invest? How should I value it?

* Should I work 5 % of the hours that I would normally work in a year?
* Should I measure the time based on the expected profit that I could end up with after this year?
* Are there any other measurements?

Apart from the startup, I work full-time in a company.
I did not say you said that.

I just pointed out that your thinking of the vietnam war by only mentioning US losses is telling. And went further on that road.
I thought OP was embedding something from DS in their page. It sounds like they are redirecting a user to DocuSign.com. I agree that the user being able to access the requester's DS is a massive security issue. So massive that it seems implausible that it actually works that way, but I don't have any experience to know one way or another.
Amazon Aurora doesn't have much to do with Postgres and is a custom storage subsystem used by many different database engines. Aurora Postgres is actually using Postgres code on top to handle queries, and eventually PG itself will get pluggable storage engines.

It's similar with Redshift although it's a much older codebase from the v8 branch with more customizations. The changes are very specific to their infrastructure and wouldn't help anyone else since it's not designed as an on-prem deployable product.

There's also no confirmation that DocumentDB runs on Postgres and its most likely a custom interface layer they wrote themselves. If you just want MongoDB on postgres then there are already open source projects that do it.
Proposing what-if scenarios and asking questions of your own and using your imagination generally falls under the name 'counterfactuals' -- a big area of AI research. But to date, the priorities of deep learning have focused elsewhere (mostly in perception of images and speech via discrete classification).

Likewise, 99% of the computing strategy used by DL practitioners and researchers continues to use large scale supervised learning -- because it continues to make advances in many problem spaces just as it is.

Is it possible to escape DL's apparent limits and use it differently to solve problems that lie in the counterfactual domain? Perhaps. But so far, there's been relatively little work or modest results along those lines.

Given the architectural model used by DL (large matrix multiplications and iterations using SIMD operations on GPUs), the prospect of applying it to alternative AI objectives that are more conventionally symbolic and whose methods are typically algebraic (and unnatural to share the same computational model as DL) do not seem to be especially promising places for DL to thrive. Not so far anyway.
For many people, their computer is now their TV. It's not the same makeup of content of previous generations, but it's the moral equivalent of previous generations' "TV".
self-describing comment
I don’t see the “6 figure annual cost” anywhere in that article and this report says $34M/yr: https://www.obrc.com/Content/Reports/OBRC%20Quarterly%20Repo...
Ask HN: Preventative, or Preventive?
"A comedian has a great joke about this. Essentially, the WORST thing you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement. Even being surrounded by criminals and prison guards is infinity better than being forced to be alone in a room. We desperately need to connect with people. It seems hard wired genetically to me."

My unscientific response to this is that it's more a personality dependency. Our personality or individuality is dependent on other individuals so when you your all alone your ego starts to disolve and all your skills and attributes that depend on ego start to fade. Most people would experience this as going insane.

Cohesion in large groups are aided by strong personalities that create and sustain larger groups(hierarchies) and than in turn enables larger groups.
If you run `npm install` again it does detect the conflict and resolve it. https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package-locks#resolving-lockfil... But in practice I haven't found any changes that have been untenable to understand with a diff.
Stanford to discontinue CS+X majors
Considering the US govt has been partially closed for over a month now, it's probably a fair statement that NO enforcement of this is going on right now. :P
Unions traditionally are there to defend the interests of its members, not to address consumer related unethical behaviors.
I don't think you understand the market for those concert grands. First off, they are into the $250k and above range for true "concert grands." However, the idea that private individuals need to buy one is ludicrous. They are sonically designed for concert halls, even a mansion would not be big enough to properly make use of one. So, take those off the table, they are for the top 100 players, the millionaires/billionaires, and concert halls, not for average serious musicians.

Second, it's a bit delusional to say most serious musicians can easily afford 22k Euros on what is essentially an experimental piano. I know dozens of serious amateurs/semi-pros/pros, and basically none of them could afford this instrument.

This is a toy for the rich and the superstar musicians who actually get paid creme of the crop wages. The rest of us 99% of the serious pianists who get paid between 0 and 100k a year, lets say, will get much much higher value on 22k euros by buying a used Steinway, Yamaha, or other instrument. Hell, I've been playing classical piano, trained with concertizing pianists, for 20 years and I make great practice use out of a $9k Kawaii bought for $6k.
The article goes to pains to deride curbside recycling, but at the same time, curbside recycling means not wasting resources and time carrying cans to the nearest recycling center, not dealing with the awful experience that is the average recycling center, and not dealing with the stores to get the resulting small change. How much gas is used driving cans and bottles to the store? I just throw cans into the curbside recycling bin along with all the other recycling, and live with the 10 cent waste as yet another tax.
Important news for Windows 7 users
Those Americans talked about are going over to purchase services, and then return. "and come back for dinner" says the article.
The difference being that the other direction of refugees are not seeking to purchase services, and don't seem to have any intention of returning/leaving the US.
I imagine things would be different if the refugees were coming in to spend money, and then leaving, instead of using resources paid for by Citizen tax dollars, and commuting crimes, and refusing to participate in the systems in place.
> allowing a full verbatim mode AND an option to keep it activated at all time for my account would be totally awesome

You can mostly solve this by creating a keyword search that launches a verbatim search. Depending on your browser, the syntax probably looks something like this (with the essential part being the 'tbs=li:1'):

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100&tbs=li:1

Then add a single letter keyword (I use 'v') so that you can search type 'v verbatim' to do a verbatim Google search for 'verbatim'. I suppose you could even make this the default search, and use something else if you ever want 'normal' mode.

Of course, this still leaves the problem that verbatim on Google doesn't always mean 'verbatim' anymore, but that part will have to wait until Google changes their ways (unless you put quotes around every word).
Science paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1140

NYT article summarizing some of the issues addressed: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/science/chess-artificial-...
Because I don’t trust it. Had to do rm -rf node_modules too many times with npm.
Thanks for the links. I did not know about "inurl" and "intitle" these will be handy helping me re-find results which is something I find myself doing a lot more than I would expect.
Maybe it's the software itself and nothing associated with it. When something is 'Google' it's not automatically good or bad.
Most games have $80-$120 editions that include all of the actual content. $60 is usually the bare bones experience. That is on top of monetization in game.

But prices don't exist in a vacuum either. The gaming market has exploded and is vastly larger than it was back in 2006.

Steam found games were typically much more profitable when heavily discounted than when full price in general.
Because that’s not how the web works. There is only one sandbox per frame and all code in that frame is in the same sandbox. It doesn’t make much sense to do it differently because JavaScript can modify the behavior of the built in objects and thus that of other scripts in the same environment.
Worth noting his original reason for moving away from DynamoDB is outdated. DynamoDB added an “adaptive capacity” feature to handle hot partitions.[1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/how-amazon-dynamodb-ad...
> Considering that the pill dries up vaginal secretions and lowers libido, another possible take on the refusal to not cover contraception (assuming that it was not cobeted) is that our culture believes women are entitled to good sex.

That doesn't follow. I mean, many prescription drugs have death as a known potential side effect, and it's generally accepted that people have a right to life, but that doesn't mean that the drugs aren't covered. Being entitled something doesn't justify third party insurers denying you coverage for something which might interfere with that entitlement when you have voluntarily accepted that risk to acheive some other end.

> Last time I checked its not like sex where one could get pregnant was no longer fun

Your idea of fun is, I suspect, not universal.
Have you ever considered that maybe it's due to past union efforts that they currently don't have massive transgressions they must currently fight against?

Sure, we've all heard the anecdotes of a union protecting some guy who probably wasn't competent or cut out for the job. But how do you like your weekends? Benefits? Work/life balance? It's not perfect, but those things would gradually erode away without unions to fight for and defend them. Don't think companies will preserve that forever just out of the goodness of their hearts. Don't think it's just a permanent, inviolate fixture of our culture now. It's a hard-earned way of life that our ancestors carved out for us.

Actually, those things are gradually eroding away this very moment, because unions are now terribly weak and most Americans have internalized this contrived hatred of organized labor. It's not going to go well for workers in the future if we're so complacent. Make no mistake, you and I both enjoy the fruits of bitter and intense union battles from previous generations. They may seem unnecessary relics of the past now, but without them we'd be back in tenement housing working 16 hour days and making barely enough money to afford rent and food from the company store very quickly. Lots of industries are already pushing us back to that state. Be grateful your career has a union. It's definitely well worth one percent of your salary.
> (Later – a lot later – a Deliveroo spokesman would tell me it was likely I had been the victim of a “credential stuffing” attack, in which hackers obtain lists of usernames and passwords and try them out on other platforms.)

So this Tech Journalist uses the same password on every site?
This is awesome, congrats. Any chance you all may change the license to something more permissive? :fingers crossed:
Angular is hated? Angular is my only way out of Javascript fatigue, it just works.
Honestly, I fail to see why asking employees for 80-hour or even 120-hour work weeks in the game industry is a problem at all. If employees don't like it, they're free to leave.

This isn't the healthcare field where safety is crucial, or some shitty industry full of un/semi-skilled laborers who live paycheck-to-paycheck and have few viable alternatives, and can't just afford to walk out of work one day. This is an industry of highly-paid professionals, which is a subset of a much larger industry (software) that is absolutely booming in today's economy. There is no shortage of software jobs out there right now. If you don't like being mistreated at some game dev shop, then quit and go find a job somewhere else.

These people are only being mistreated because they allow it. Cry me a river.
I had to laugh at myself, because my first thought was that it's related to the efforts of the swelling numbers of the homeless. That's basically a joke out of thin air mind you, not a "statement," so please don't bother refuting or confirming.

One thing's for sure -- and this was discussed when China first reneged on recycling the plastics: Commingled recycling at the curb has been a disaster. In my opinion, predictably so. I remember being surprised when it first began, to think that it could be economical or efficient to have to separate the streams further downstream. Turns out I was right.

Sorting and separating isn't that hard, and people would've learned and mastered it by now, if they'd been required to do it. Contrary to the hope, if you coddle people they will not show their appreciation by meeting the new, lower minimum expected of them; they will continue to push the bar even lower.
> We (non-Americans) were all writing code and staying at Google in the late evenings

You weren't really doing Google a favor, they were paying you well above market for your work. The fact that your nationality is a point for you to highlight is indicative of your warped expectations. You chose to move to America, no one forced it on you. And you chose to work for Google. If America welcomed you, allowed you to freely express yourself and thrive professionally, WHY is liking America, or supporting the defense establishment that protects your civil liberties and safety, and creates a stable socio-political environment for YOU and million others who immigrate and live here, such a toxic thing?

America is the world's most sought after immigration destination for a reason, it's OK to acknowledge the positives, and like it for the same
Rotary knobs are great, I created a react component inspired by them. https://github.com/hugozap/react-rotary-knob
"Unionized" is not the same as "not willing to put in more work". It's more about "not willing to put up with more bullshit".

Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.
Break it up into what? All the problems of Facebook are inherent to Facebook as a product, "breaking up" Facebook doesn't really fix anything.
Looking at the bigger picture, as a whole, adjusted for inflation, looks like games have actually gotten a bit cheaper. An NES game was $30-$40 in 1988[1], that's $65-$85 in 2018 dollars.

You also have a whole category of "basic" games (like phone games or indy games) that are nominally (unadjusted) cheaper than a retail NES game for the full version. I'm not an expert on this category by any means but I bought a few games from the Switch store that are very comparable to an NES game for $5-20. That's only a max of $9 in 1988 dollars!!

I'd agree that "consumer [un]friendly practices" are still a problem though. (could be a case of a few "whales" making large purchases on stuff like loot boxes subsidizing everyone else)

[1] http://videogamecomicads.blogspot.com/2012/12/sears-nintendo...

DISCLAIMER: I only play single player console games.
> we use our taxes to ... sick ... disease

The US pays as much in tax for nationally provided healthcare as % of GDP as does most of the OECD. The difference is healthcare costs twice as much here, so the govt ends up paying about half the cost through taxes.

For example, Sweden pays ~$5500 (PPP) per capita. US spends ~$10,209. US Medicare and Medicaid paid out about $1.3T, private healthcare paid about $1.2T.

So we're paying the same tax towards healthcare as most of the OECD. The healthcare angle is not the difference in taxation between the countries. The underlying costs are the difference, represented at every level here, from nurse and doctor salaries to drug costs to administrative costs to legislative costs.
> in return for having to solve the "puzzle", programmers in more strongly-typed languages gain numerous other advantages

advantages and disadvantages. and solution to the puzzle is almost always wrong or becomes outdated and requires major rethinkings often.
Talent shortage in quantum computing
I'm in favor of allowing people to live without needing to work. I understand that there needn't be a job for every person in the world. I'm aware that nobody should have to work 40 hours a week anymore.

I'm open to a system that allows all of these things to happen.

However - applying that system on a micro scale (one workplace at a time, through unions) introduces way too much friction between employers and their employees, employees and their peers, and employers and unions.

It also causes an internal conflict for the employee - where they have to mask their lack of contribution by busywork, ultimately feeling unfulfilled in their life.

Unionizing all workplaces is a sub-optimal means to distribute wealth.
You don’t need JavaScript to make the user download a disk image. If you don’t just trust any ‘please install this plugin’ prompt you’re fine with or without JavaScript.
Crowdsourced maps should help driverless cars navigate our cities more safely